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The 'Impossible' Mission To Fix The Hubble Space Telescope
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The 'Impossible' Mission To Fix The Hubble Space Telescope

45 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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Launched in 1990 with a flawed mirror, the Hubble Space Telescope was nearly a write-off before NASA engineers figured out how to correct its vision in orbit. This film traces the servicing missions astronauts flew to keep Hubble working, the spacewalks required to swap cameras and gyroscopes hundreds of miles above Earth, and the tension around each repair, any one of which could have ended in disaster or left the telescope permanently blind. Archival mission footage and NASA imagery sit alongside interviews explaining the engineering problems each crew had to solve, from the original corrective optics package to later upgrades that extended the telescope's life decades past its original design. The film also revisits some of Hubble's signature discoveries, including deep-field images of galaxies from the early universe, to show what was at stake in keeping it alive. It's a story about hardware maintenance turned into one of the more dramatic chapters of the shuttle program, told through the people who had to get it right on the first try.