... when the Hubble was launched in 1990, a blunder in the design of its optics generated hopelessly blurred images. Corrective optics were installed during the telescope's first servicing mission in 1993, which enabled the sharp images that we now take for granted. But for three years the images were simply fuzzy. What to do? We kept taking data, hoping some useful science would nonetheless come of it. Eager astrophysicists at Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, the research headquarters for the Hubble, wrote suites of advanced image-processing software to help identify and isolate stars in otherwise crowded, unfocused fields. These novel techniques allowed some science to get done while the repair mission was planned.

Meanwhile, medical researchers at the Lombardi Cancer Research Center at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., recognized that the challenge faced by astrophysicists was similar to that faced by doctors in their visual search for tumors in mammograms. Using funds granted by the National Science Foundation, the medical community adopted the new techniques being used for the Hubble to assist their early detection of breast cancer. Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.