Reading Simon Winchester in the book ‘Exactly’ he describes how that happened. Seems , from the operator who entered the wrong data in the polishing to company heads, no one was brave enough to admit that the mirror was flawed, so they sent it anyway. Maybe they thought no one would notice until they had their money.
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Originally Posted by billdan
The same can be said for the Hubble Space Telescope, Perkin Elmer ground/polished the Primary Mirror to the wrong shape and this introduced spherical aberration.
In the subsequent enquiry, P.E was criticised for using the wrong Null testing instruments, NASA was also criticised for not doing any Q.A or testing of the mirror before launch.
The original quote from P.E was $400 Million (that won them the tender over the price Kodak quoted), this blew out to $4.7 Billion by launch time.
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