University Daily Kansan / Monday, November 26, 1990
9
NASA, manufacturer to blame for flawed mirror, report says
The Associated Press
HARTFORD, Conn. — NASA and the manufacturer share the blame for a flawed mirror that prevents the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope from focusing clearly, a member of an investigatory panel said.
The NASA panel's final report on the flawed telescope will criticize both the space agency and the Perkin-Elmer Corp., said John Mangus, head of the optics branch of the University of Illinois and Space Administration's space technology division. The report is to be released tomorrow.
Mangus said the flaws in the manufacture of the 941s -iine telescope in 1980 and 1981 could be partly traced to the same management climate that led to the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
In both cases, he said, engineers were discouraged from bringing potential problems to the attention of their superiors.
An investigation into the Challenger explosion that killed seven crew members found that NASA ignored evidence of problems with O-rings sealing the joints of the shuttle's solid fuel rocket boosters. Investigation officials said NASA for weak control and found that, under intense schedule pressure, engineers sometimes failed to report problems to managers.
The immediate cause of the Hubble flaw was a technician's mistake, but program managers approved the quality-control program that allowed the mistake to escape detection, the investigatory board concluded.
Board members would not release
the report, but Mangus and other members said that the report also stated:
Mirror-testing that was done relied too heavily on a single instrument, which had been assembled improperly. Relatively simple "sanitary" equipment has been done to make sure the mirror-joining system was working properly.
- Too little contact existed between those working on the mirror and NASA project supervisors who could have understood the test results.
Quality-control inspectors lacked the expertise in optics to understand results of some tests that showed a flaw in the mirror.
The Hubble telescope was launched with the space shuttle April 24, and the focusing flaw was disclosed June 27.
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