RSS
Home
Five Spacewalks, 11 Days: Hubble Servicing Mission Has High-Flying Goals
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Story Musgrave works on Hubble in 1993/NASA
Having made it through an already-rugged tropical storm system, NASA workers are now focused on the upcoming STS-125 mission, now set to launch Oct. 10. Ahead: the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, not only an orbiting observatory but a scientific time machine as well.
Space Shuttle Atlantis and her crew – Commander Scott Altman, Pilot Gregory C. Johnson and Mission Specialists Andrew Feustel, Michael Good, John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino and Megan McArthur – will be carrying some new scientific instruments for Hubble. The telescope was launched in 1990 from Discovery.
“We’ve actually seen an object that emitted its light about 13 billion years ago,” said Hubble senior scientist Dave Leckrone. “Since the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that’s its infancy, the nursery. From the nearest parts of our solar system to further back in time than anyone has ever looked before, we’ve taken ordinary citizens on a voyage through the universe.”
Hubble and space fans around the world have enjoyed the haunting photos Hubble has sent home. Recently, the mission team celebrated Hubble's 100,000th orbit.
Spacewalking astronauts will upgrade some equipment onboard Hubble and install new items. Their worklist includes adding these instruments to Hubble's suite:
--The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is designed to observe the light put out by extremely faint, far-away quasars and see how that light changes as it passes through the intervening gas between distant galaxies. In this way scientists will learn what that gas is made of, how it’s changed over time and how it affects the galaxies around it. That data will give scientists more clues about how the universe has changed over time.
--The Wide Field Camera 3 will allow Hubble to take large-scale, extremely clear and detailed pictures over a very wide range of colors. At ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths the WFC3 is a dramatically-improved camera for Hubble.
The team will also repair components inside a camera and a spectrograph. Both of them were designed to not come apart in space. So mission planners had to come up with a way to literally work against their original design.
It's not going to be easy. One task will require spacewalking astronauts to remove more than 100 screws to access just one computer card.
Working in gravity, floating outside their spaceship, astronauts will again test the limits of their training--and physical endurance. The effort required to take some ordinary actions, like turning a wrench, and maintain their position is enormous.
While it's very physical, working on Hubble's delicate instruments is also very precise,
“It’s more like brain surgery than construction,” Lead Flight Director Tony Ceccacci said. “On station spacewalks, you’re installing large pieces of equipment – trusses, modules, etc. – and putting it together like an erector set. You can’t do that with Hubble. Hubble spacewalks are comparable to standing at an operating table, doing very dexterous work.”
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
