![]() ![]() “And I was at a point in my career where I said, “If it’s that bad, I’ll resign. “Scientific discovery requires risk,” Williams says. And to him, the potential observations were so important and so fundamental for understanding how the universe evolved that the experiment was a no-brainer, consequences be damned. Wiliams suspected the billion light-year stare might capture eons of galactic evolution in a single frame and uncover some of the faintest, farthest galaxies ever seen. “But as director, I had 10 percent of the telescope time, and I could do what I wanted.” “The telescope allocation committee would never have approved such a long, risky project,” he explains. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he had a certain amount of Hubble’s time at his personal disposal. And, to be honest, it didn’t really matter how much his colleagues protested. And now, finally, it was time to start erasing the frustrations of Hubble’s early years.Įxcept that staring at nothing and coming up empty didn’t seem like the best way to do that.īut Williams was undeterred. After the fix, the previously blind eye in the sky could finally see stars as more than blurred points of light. Not much earlier, astronauts had dragged Hubble into the cargo bay of the space shuttle Endeavour and corrected a disastrous flaw in the prized telescope’s vision. ![]() Perceptions of the project, which had already cost multiple billions of dollars, were pretty dismal. Plus, another Hubble failure would be a public relations nightmare. People would kill for that amount of time with the sharpest tool in the shed, they said, and besides - no way would the distant galaxies Williams hoped to see be bright enough for Hubble to detect. It was a terrible idea, his colleagues told him, and a waste of valuable telescope time. In 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. ![]()
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