Special Tools Required For Last Call To Hubble
source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103915475
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The right tools can make any job easier, and that will be especially true this week when the Hubble Space Telescope gets its last tuneup.
When space shuttle Atlantis blasts off Monday on the final flight to Hubble, the astronauts will be carrying 180 special tools, and 116 of them were designed just for this mission, which involves tricky repairs to two science instruments that were never intended to be fixed in space. Liftoff is scheduled for 2:01 p.m. EDT.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. It has been serviced four times before, with the last servicing mission occurring in 2002.
"Over the last few years, we've seen significant deterioration within the set of scientific instruments that we provide to the astronomical community," says David Leckrone, senior project scientist for Hubble at NASA.
He says that after this visit, if all goes well, Hubble should be more powerful than ever before.
Astronauts are scheduled to go on five spacewalks to give the telescope an upgrade that includes new batteries and gyroscopes, and additional science instruments.
But some of the most ambitious repair work involves "actually going into the very guts of instruments that have suffered failures that were never meant to be touched on orbit," says Michael Weiss, deputy program manager for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
When space shuttle Atlantis blasts off Monday on the final flight to Hubble, the astronauts will be carrying 180 special tools, and 116 of them were designed just for this mission, which involves tricky repairs to two science instruments that were never intended to be fixed in space. Liftoff is scheduled for 2:01 p.m. EDT.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. It has been serviced four times before, with the last servicing mission occurring in 2002.
"Over the last few years, we've seen significant deterioration within the set of scientific instruments that we provide to the astronomical community," says David Leckrone, senior project scientist for Hubble at NASA.
He says that after this visit, if all goes well, Hubble should be more powerful than ever before.
Astronauts are scheduled to go on five spacewalks to give the telescope an upgrade that includes new batteries and gyroscopes, and additional science instruments.
But some of the most ambitious repair work involves "actually going into the very guts of instruments that have suffered failures that were never meant to be touched on orbit," says Michael Weiss, deputy program manager for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
