The effect of the mirror flaw on scientific observations depended on the particular observation—the core of the aberrated PSF was sharp enough to permit high-resolution observations of bright objects, and spectroscopy was largely unaffected. However, the loss of light to the large, out of focus halo severely reduced the usefulness of the telescope for faint objects or high-contrast imaging. This meant that nearly all of the cosmological programs were essentially impossible, since they required observation of exceptionally faint objects.[51] NASA and the telescope became the butt of many jokes, and the project was popularly regarded as a white elephant. (For instance, in the 1991 comedy The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, the Hubble was pictured with the Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the Edsel).[52] Nonetheless, during the first three years of the Hubble mission, before the optical corrections, the telescope still carried out a large number of productive observations. The error was well characterized and stable, enabling astronomers to optimize the results obtained using sophisticated image processing techniques such as deconvolution.[53]
Design of a solution
COSTAR on display at the National Air and Space Museum The design of the telescope had always incorporated servicing missions, and astronomers immediately began to seek potential solutions to the problem that could be applied at the first servicing mission, scheduled for 1993. While Kodak and Itek had each ground back-up mirrors for Hubble, it would have been impossible to replace the mirror in orbit, and too expensive and time-consuming to bring the telescope temporarily back to Earth for a refit. Instead, the fact that the mirror had been ground so precisely to the wrong shape led to the design of new optical components with exactly the same error but in the opposite sense, to be added to the telescope at the servicing mission, effectively acting as "spectacles" to correct the spherical aberration.[58][59]