A former scientist at the company that made the Hubble Space Telescope's flawed mirror says he retired in part because his calls for more tests were ignored.
Roderic M. Scott told The Hartford Courant in a story Sunday that he did not suspect anything was wrong with the mirrors but felt that more testing should have been done at Perkin-Elmer Corp. as insurance against error.He said he pushed for additional testing because he knew the $1.5 billion orbiting telescope would be difficult to repair if there was a problem.
"I said, `Let's take a week and do an independent test.' I was stirring the pot, trying to get them to do some more tests," Scott, 75, said.
He said he retired as chief scientist for Perkin-Elmer Corp.'s optical division a year early, in 1980, partly out of frustration.
Perkin-Elmer had planned a final test after the mirrors were polished but abandoned it because of time and financial considerations, the newspaper said. The test probably would have detected the flaw, it said. The newspaper attributed the information to three people who worked on the project but did not name them.
A flaw in the telescope's 94.5-inch main mirror was discovered in June. The mistake produces blurry images from the telescope, which was supposed to take clearer pictures of the far reaches of space than are possible from the ground.
NASA has blamed the flaw on a measuring device used in making the mirror and said last week a space shuttle mission can easily fix much of the problem.
A NASA investigative board, headed by Lew Allen, director of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is searching for documents to find out what role NASA had in shaping Perkin-Elmer's testing procedures.
Terrence A. Facey, head scientist for the Hubble project, said he was generally satisfied with the testing the company did on the mirrors.