My Dad Made the mirror for the Hubble!!!

Hey DU!!! I just wanted everyone to know that my Dad, C.Eugene Peters, finally got some recognition for making the Hubble mirror.They are going back up to fix the Hubble for the last time so this past Saturday, he turned 75 years old and the newspaper happened to come out to his house and interviewed him about the Hubble repair.they also interview one of the his co-waroker too.Then that sparked the local news channel to go out the next day and interview him as well.Pretty cool to finally get some recognition for some amazing work.He also made some of the glass for some of the Apollo's and the first flight to the moon and all that.

That is him with the transition lenses(I broke down and bought new glasses, a couple yrs ago) which is hilarious because he is the type to have the taped up glasses and the pocket protector.Seriously,he is the type to fix everything with duct tape but yet he makes the best glass in the world.He is obviously retired now but we hear from new Corning employees that they still refer to my Dad's work.What a smarty pants.

If you watch the video they actually get all the names mixed up below them but my dad is the one with the transition lenses.LOL
Link to new clip and newspaper article

http://www.wwnytv.com/news/local/44776237.html

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090510/NEWS05/305109930

my dad is on the right in the picture.

all very proud.

:toast: for your Dad

I can't believe this is the last mission to service it.

Very Cool!

:thumbsup: for your dad and you!

Duct tape !! Congratulations.

thanks a bunch Sequoia.

Kick for your father, I love the Hubble!

but it was another companies job( not his) to buff it to certain specs.

You must be thrilled to see him getting this recognition after all this time!

Congrats to you, and especially him!

:toast:

I'm watching the Hubble grab right now on NASA TV.

Frankly, the database part wasn't all that exciting and most of the "requirements" were in some sort of weird language NASA used that I didn't even try to understand. I was young at the time and didn't grasp the significance of what I was working on. But I wrote most of the code!

It was written in a language called "Info" on a Prime mini computer the size of two refrigerators and a large beer cooler (the 300MB hard drive) - yes THREE HUNDRED MB, not GB, but MB!!! One of the "refrigerators" was a Kennedy vacuum load tape drive that took 9 track 2400 foot spools of tape. If the tape got stretched over time and the vacuum seal was lost, three would be tape all over the place and it was like something out of a comedy movie. It could take an HOUR to re-roll the tape by hand!

At the time I was drinking two pots of coffee a day and chain smoking from the time I woke up until I went to bed. So I was wired for the deal.

did you have a pocket protector? :rofl: :thumbsup:

I usually came in around 3:00 pm and worked until 9:00 am or so or whenever someone told me I looked like shit and needed to get out of the office. A lot of the operations took HOURS to run. Sometimes this involved long naps under the terminal table with a shitload of "CTRL-G"s after the command to wake me up (that's the old ASCII BEEP code). Smoking helped. Being stoned helped more. Man that was a long time ago.

I love that Stoned Hippy Geeks are partly responsible for the Hubble!

You couldn't get anything done during the day when the yuppy EST freak managers were around. I pretty much lived in the computer room when they were gone.

:smoke: yes, that was a long time ago....

some really kick ass code happens in a very short period of time! Of course we didn't have cell phones back then and nobody called the office after 5:00, so it was quiet.

It is funny how when you are younger you don't have a full appreciation for what you are doing.Congrats on your work!

I used to think writing games in DOS was cool.

:yourock:

One of my all time favorites (and one I actually beta teated) was Transport Tycoon. And of course the early Sim Ciy games.

YAY!

A big :hug: and :toast: to your Dad for opening new horizons for us all.

:thumbsup:

you ought to be real proud of your dad!

I know he put a lot of effort into that mirror. Congrats to him.

He watches what is going on with Hubble( don't we all) and to hear that this is their last time going up to fix it.I have to wonder if it will be longer or if they will decide to fix it again or update it again..we shall see.

that is really nice of you guys.I should send him the link.

That is really cool! :toast:

Give a big DU hug for all of us!

This weekend we are taking our kids to Palomar Observatory where the 200" Hale Telescope is housed - web cam: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/webcam.html

We owe your father & people like him a debt of thanks for their work - they have made it possible for us to look back in time 13 billion years to see our universe in its infancy.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/29/gamma.ray.burst.space/

Your fathers dedication and work has allowed us to see amazing things and I wish I could shake his hand. Here are thumbnails of Hubble images:


This is a well known image of the Eagle Nebula:


:applause: Your Dad ROCKS!

those images too.It is amazing how many there are of us who love these images.I am sure scientists have learned alot too.

:evilgrin:

Congrats to your father.

sent back...... wow!! :applause: <http://images.google.com/images?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=hubble+pictures&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=TQ0LSr7vJobOMZG-xNUL&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title>

She is in a gifted childrens program and their final project for the year was to write a book. She frequently checks out hubblesite.org to view the beautiful photos! :hi:

Whenever I see those fabulous photos of the Universe I feel like we better pay attention to our gorgeous planet and stop all the other meaningless crap like wars and human misery. We are all part of the stars.

I mean it. Tell him what I said.

and let him see for himself.He made the greatest page on DU.Woohoo!

Wonderful recognition.

:toast:

I have another reply to this post. I was the lead developer for the Hubble requirements database. A few years after they did the "correction" for the fuzzy vision, I found out from what I consider to be a highly reliable source that the mirror wasn't the problem. It was cut to the exact specification mandated by the requirements. That specification was the thing that was wrong. There was a design change early in the program that should have altered the focal point for the mirror. The change was never made. They built a perfect mirror for an older design of the telescope.

I can't remember when we talked about that(20 years ago maybe) but it was surely a long time ago.I try to understand what he is talking about but when you don't understand the terminology it makes for poor recollection of it.I thought Dad had said it was the buffering company had buffered it a little too much.:shrug:

The OP piqued my interest, so I started looking into what I remember as an almost comical view of the whole project in the eyes of a lot of people. It was even in the movie Naked Gun 2 1/2, alongside the Titanic, Edsel, and Hindenberg.

I was trying to remember exactly what I heard about the problem. It seems to me that I once heard that the problem arose from grinding the mirror in a 1 G environment, without consideration of what would happen once it was in space. I think I heard that it warped once it was in the zero G environment. Turns out I was wrong (my Fiance often asks if I ever get tired of that).

So here's what I copied from Wikipedia, which pretty much mirrors (pun intended) what I found at other sites word for word (emphasis added).
-----
Analysis of the flawed images showed that the cause of the problem was that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. Although it was probably the most precisely figured mirror ever made, with variations from the prescribed curve of no more than 1/65 of the wavelength of visible light, it was too flat at the edges. The mirror was barely 2.3 micrometres out from the required shape, but the difference was catastrophic, introducing severe spherical aberration, a flaw in which light reflecting off the edge of a mirror focuses on a different point from the light reflecting off its center.

A commission headed by Lew Allen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was established to determine how the error could have arisen. The Allen Commission found that the main null corrector, a device used to measure the exact shape of the mirror, had been incorrectly assembled—one lens was wrongly spaced by 1.3 mm. During the polishing of the mirror, Perkin-Elmer had analyzed its surface with two other null correctors, both of which (correctly) indicated that the mirror was suffering from spherical aberration. The company ignored these test results as it believed that the two null correctors were less accurate than the primary device that was reporting that the mirror was perfectly figured.
-----

I may be absolutely incorrect, and if I am please corrrect me, but what I take from that is that the mirror wasn't perfectly parabolic all the way to it's edge. Let me reiterate that I'm not trying to disprove what you say, but there is information in the public domain that goes against what your source told you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_telescope#Flawed_mirror

What a great recognition.

if Dick Dent and dad weren't on the job maybe we would not be looking at those pics today.Did Dick's kids go to Canton or another school?

My dad was an engineer for a research facility and used pocket protectors and duct tape, too. He still does, though he's "retired" and working full-time for my brother (who's a cooler geek). I'll never forget the dinner at Big Boy where he drew out how to build a nuclear warhead from memory (he'd worked at Livermore in the 60s).

is like that too.Hee hee.What a funny Big Boy story.I am sure you Dad could tell some cool stories.

Of course, he can't tell everything, as a lot is still classified, but the stories from the cyclotron lab are still funny. We hosted the lab pig roast/picnic every summer for years, and you've never had fun like that--four hundred or more serious geeks/nerds and their families having chess tournaments next to the volleyball match next to the amazing potluck of foods from all over the world. I miss those.

:applause:

Give him a BIG :hug: for me!



Edit: added more pics

Thanks MagickMuffin.It hard to really comprehend what he did, you know.

I really can't imagine all that scientist have discovered due to the hubble.

I also can barely imagine all of the other nameless contributors' to the Hubble and other important projects like that.My Dad and Dick Dent were essentially nameless all these years until the little paper picked up the story.

that he made the mirror for the Hubble!

Just thought I'd throw in that subject line for when your dad checks out this thread! :)

Seriously. So nice to see your Dad getting this well deserved recognition.

No Seriously thanks.I already called him today and expained to him he was on the greatest page today and he thought that was something else.Thanks Blaze He will love it!

It nailed it.Wow I am going to go check out some of the others over there.Thanks for sharing.I will definately send a ling to dad on that utube video.WOW WOW

Kind of puts Earth and mankind into perspective, doesn't it?

You have to think there are other human or human like forms of life out there.I will be recording that and sending it to Dad.He doesn't have DSL when he is up Norht for the Summer.I don't know if I or Dad really can comprehend what the Hubble means to all kinds of people.

The Hubble Space Telescope has returned views of what our universe is about and was like -- almost to the edge of time.

Please thank your father, keepthemhonest. He is a hero.

oh by the way he has been on hospice for the past 3.5 years.I don't know if it is common knowledge or not but hospice means you typically have 6 months or less to live.He is a real fighter.
He is a diehard Democrat too that canot stand racist comments.I am very proud to be his daughter.

:headbang:

This was several years before the Hubble was launched and it talked about the molecule level exactness that was needed.

Did your dad write that?

but it sounds very interesting.Thanks so much.My sister is going to print this whole thing out for him and bring it to camp.When he is up north for the summer he does not have DSL he has dial up(does anyone even have that anymore?)LOL

That is something to be very proud of.

peanut butter jelly sandwiches with potato chips on it.

lauched in 1990?

My Dad said that it was buffed by incorrectly by another company after they made the glass.That is the way I remember it.

It sounds like a great town, and your Dad sounds like a very cool guy!

literally Watertown and Polaski area get dumped with snow and it's very cold.He is an hour north of there.We grew up in Canton but he retired at Boyd Pond just outside of Russel,NY.in the winter he is a snow bird.