Bringing the Image of God Into Focus
Genesis 1:26-31 (NET) - Pastor Curtis Isaacson
2 Corinthians 3:18:
“And we all, with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
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At 8:33 am on April 24, 1990, the three main engines of Space Shuttle Discovery roared to life. Almost immediately, the massive 17-story tall twin solid rocket boosters ignited, each capable of burning 12,000 pounds of propellant per second. 6 seconds later, STS-31 left the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. In her cargo bay was an incredible feat of human engineering, the joint product of NASA and the European Space Agency.
One day later, the crew of Discovery deployed that payload from her cargo bay and the Hubble Space Telescope was in orbit. STS-31 was a success, with Discovery and her crew safely touching down at Edwards Air Force Base a few days later. However, back in orbit, it didn’t take long for things to unravel for Hubble. The reflective telescope is equipped with two precision ground mirrors that gather and focus light into its imaging cameras. But the images Hubble began reflecting were distorted, fuzzy, blurry, out of focus.
Two months after launch, NASA announced the problem with the multibillion spacecraft: Hubble’s primary mirror had a defect called spherical aberration, which affected the image clarity. The curvature of the nearly 8-foot diameter primary mirror was off by just 2 microns, or 1/50th the width of a human hair. A rescue mission was needed to save Hubble.
On December 2, 1993, STS-61 launched to rendezvous with the telescope. The crew of Shuttle Endeavour successfully repaired Hubble’s imaging problem using what amounted to a refrigerator-sized pair of eyeglasses. Over thirty years later, Hubble is still astounding the world with incredible images of our universe, including the famed Pillars of Creation (picture). The story of Hubble is much like that of ours: an amazing creation that’s reflecting a distorted image in need of a daring rescue mission.
