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Commercialization

A NASA Spinoff That No One Seems To Have Noticed

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
June 26, 2017
Filed under
A NASA Spinoff That No One Seems To Have Noticed

Hubble Contact Lenses
“Go to your exam, try out Hubble contacts, and get your prescription.”
Hubble Servicing Mission 1, NASA
“After Hubble’s deployment in 1990, scientist realized that the telescope’s primary mirror had a flaw called spherical aberration. The outer edge of the mirror was ground too flat by a depth of 2.2 microns (roughly equal to one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair). This aberration resulted in images that were fuzzy because some of the light from the objects being studied was being scattered. COSTAR (the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement) was developed as an effective means of countering the effects of the flawed shape of the mirror. COSTAR was a telephone booth-sized instrument which placed 5 pairs of corrective mirrors, some as small as a nickel coin, in front of the Faint Object Camera, the Faint Object Spectrograph and the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph.”
Keith’s note: On their visit a doctor page they refer to “Dr. Edwin”. As in Edwin Hubble. Get it?

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

2 responses to “A NASA Spinoff That No One Seems To Have Noticed”

  1. Boardman says:
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    Did some work with Kodak a few years back. They always were keen to mention they made the flight spare while Perkin Elmer made the flight mirror.
    Of course Kodak’s flight spare had no aberration.and they were proud to show it off, and sad it didn’t fly instead.

  2. fcrary says:
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    In fact, something along these lines has happened before, probably by accident. The first time I went to a meeting at (well, just outside) Johnson Space Center, I noticed that the entire area around it was locally referred to as “NASA”, as if that were the name of a suburb. Local businesses used it all the time, as in “NASA Dry Cleaning” or “NASA Deep Dish Pizza.” This was in the mid-2000s, when there was lots of discussion about “vision” (or lack thereof) in NASA’s future plans. So I thought it was hilarious to see an optometrist’s office with a sign saying “NASA Vision Center.”