NASA Begins Focusing Telescope for Taking First Picture This Week

NASA engineers on Saturday began focusing the Hubble Space Telescope in preparation for taking the $1.5-billion orbiting observatory’s first picture of the heavens this week.

As the 12-ton telescope orbited 381 miles above Earth, technicians at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., began the work of commencing a 38-hour “bootstrap” process of focusing the craft’s mirrors.

If all goes well, the telescope’s wide field planetary camera will snap the telescope’s historic “first light” picture between Wednesday and Friday, depending on whether the process needs repeating.

The subject of the picture, which is intended as a test and not to produce any new discoveries, will be a 3-billion-year-old star cluster known as NGC 3532, about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina. A light-year, the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year, is about 5.8 trillion miles.

Workers on Saturday also completed a set of tests on the telescope’s guidance system, tested several instruments and turned on full power to the high-speed photometer--a high-tech light meter--and faint object camera.

The guidance system and instruments will be critical during the 15-year mission of the telescope.