CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., May 15, 2009
Hubble Repair Poses Daunting Challenge
Atlantis Astronauts Installing New Gyroscopes, Batteries During 2nd Spacewalk
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Play CBS Video Video Hubble Repair Mission Setbacks Aside from wonder and amazement while stationed 350 miles above Earth, NASA spacewalkers have also faced dramatic moments in the effort to update the Hubble Space Telescope. Daniel Sieberg reports.
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Video Hubble Repair To Begin A piano-sized camera will be installed by astronauts during a high-orbit spacewalk to give the telescope a longer life. Space debris adds a level of risk to the mission, reports Daniel Sieberg.
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Video Fixing The Hubble Telescope Up in space, the Atlantis crew made a spectacular catch of the Hubble telescope. The crew aims to fix Hubble, which has been taking picture of far off galaxies for 19 years. Daniel Sieberg reports.
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Astronaut Mike Good works on the Hubble Space Telescope during a spacewalk, May 15, 2009. (AP Photo/NASA TV)
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The Hubble Space Telescope viewed from inside the Space Shuttle Atlantis, after the giant observatory was grabbed by the shuttle's Canadian-built remote manipulator system, May 13, 2009. (NASA)
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Astronauts will install these two new battery modules onto Hubble during Service Mission 4 spacewalks, providing extended power life to the telescope. (NASA/Chris Gunn)
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The NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. (NASA/Thierry Legault)
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Interactive The Hubble Get an inside look at the Hubble space telescope and see some extraordinary images taken through its eye.
Astronaut Michael Massimino and fellow spacewalker Michael "Bueno" Good successfully installed four state-of-the-art gyroscopes in the Hubble Space Telescope today, reports CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood.
Replacing Hubble's gyroscopes was the top priority for this final repair mission to the 19-year-old observatory. The gyroscopes are part of the telescope pointing system, and half of the old ones were broken.
Massimino and Good floated out of the shuttle at 8:49 a.m. ET on a spacewalk expected to last about six and a half hours.
Massimino slowly wedged himself into the telescope, head first, and started pulling out the old gyroscopes and putting in the new ones. His spacewalking partner helped.
"Trained my whole life for this," Massimino said as he squeezed his tall, husky body inside. Earlier, outside the telescope, he joked, "Anybody home?"
Replacing the gyro packages requires an astronaut to float inside the telescope, within inches of delicate equipment that could be damaged by an inadvertent movement.
Massimino, a returning Hubble mechanic who is over 6-feet tall, took care not to bump anything inside Hubble while replacing the gyroscopes. Despite the tight fit, NASA expected the work to be relatively straightforward; two gyroscopes are bundled together, for a total of three compact, 24-pound boxes. Sure enough, the first set went in easily.
But an alignment problem prevented installation of a box containing the final two gyros, and the astronauts were forced to install a refurbished spare in its place, Harwood said.
Engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., verified that all six gyros were properly connected and working properly.
Massimino had a brief fright when his communication system fouled up. For a minute or two, no one could not hear him. "That was scary," said one of the astronauts inside when the problem cleared up.
"A little bit," Massimino replied.
The two will also begin replacing battery modules on the telescope.
CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood reports that the telescope's aging nickel-hydrogen batteries now operate at half their original capacity.
"They were built a couple of years before we launched in '90," said Hubble Program Manager Preston Burch. "We're so far beyond the design lifetime it's anybody's guess as to how long they could continue to go. We know it's not infinite. So our best judgment is we should go ahead and still change them out."
It was the second spacewalk in as many days for the Atlantis astronauts. On Thursday, another two-man team installed a powerful new camera and a computer data unit, after struggling with a stubborn bolt. NASA hoped for an easier, less stressful spacewalk Friday.
In all, five spacewalks are planned so that the observatory - beloved by astronomers and many others for its breathtaking views of the universe - is at its apex while living out its remaining years.
Also this morning, astronaut Megan McArthur is using the shuttle's robotic arm to complete an imaging survey, inspecting some tiles on the craft's underbelly that were missed previously.
NASA sweated a few bullets during yesterday's spacewalk, but was very pleased with the results. Astronauts on Thursday swapped out a nearly 16-year-old camera for a new one the size of a baby grand piano.
Once Astronaut Andrew Feustel and John Grunsfeld left the payload bay hatch and got positioned, they ran into a bit of trouble removing the old Wide Field Camera because a bolt was stuck. They fetched extra tools, but none seemed to work.
They were finally urged by Mission Control to use as much force as possible, even though there was a risk the bolt might break. If that had happened, the old camera would be stuck inside, leaving no room for its improved replacement.
"There were tense moments during that activity," Hubble senior scientist David Leckrone said during a post-spacewalk press conference. "I don't normally reveal my age, and I'm not going to here, but I can tell you I'm five years older now than I was when I came into work this morning."
Harwood reports that early Friday, flight controllers informed the astronauts that the newly installed $132 million Wide Field Camera 3 had passed an overnight functional test.
"That's great news," Massimino said.
Grunsfeld and Feustel also completed other major chores, including replacing a science data-handling unit that broke last autumn, and hooking up a docking ring so a robotic craft can guide Hubble into the Pacific Ocean years from now.
But the mission - a last chance to repair the Hubble Space Telescope - is just getting started.
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More From SciTech
Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 23 CommentsThe civilian space program--including the justly famed and just re-serviced Hubble Space Telescope--has been dollar-for-dollar the best investment ever made by the US federal government--both for its primary direct value in vastly enhancing our scientific understanding of our home planet Earth, much of the rest of our Solar System, our Milky Way Galaxy, and the infinite universe beyond and for its many secondary values in terms of environmental knowledge (cold desertification on Mars and greenhouse effect gone mad on Venus, for examples), international peaceful cooperation (from space, you do not see those silly artificial national borders from space that all too many people down here obsess about), educational inspiration for current and future scientists, "practical spinoffs" galore (some mentioned by earlier posters), and so on.
As CBS News Corr. Walter Cronkite has often observed, the beginning of the Space Age--most notably Project Apollo, which is marking its 40th anniversary--is what the 20th century will be by far most remembered for in 500 years (and afterward). Barring some massive catastrophe later in 2009, I would posit that this space shuttle mission to HST will be the news event with potentially the most historical impact of anything that has or will happen in 2009.
CBS News is most fortunate to have its excellent space consultant William Harwood and veteran Special Events producer (now on contract) Mark Kramer on its space coverage team. Its new young science-tech correspondent seems sharp, too. I just wish this STS-125/HST mission were receiving much. much, much more coverage, both on regular newscasts and in CBS News Special Reports, as it so richly warrants. (Even CNN has been dishearteningly skimpy with its airtime, alas.)
By the way, I am a science journalist, and avid historian-in-training, who is now finishing a journalism studies doctoral program at the University of Maryland, working on a dissertation that will provide a detailed narrative history of network television-radio space coverage since the 1950s, with particular attention to CBS News.--AR Hogan (ahogan@jmail.umd.edu)
To those who ask for the sense of it all, I would respond: The same spirit that makes us go out to space today made Europeans ship out on the oceans in the 17th century. This way, America was discovered by Europeans.
Without this spirit, no invention would be made, progress wouldn't happen and the US of A in its current form wouldn't exist.
That is correct, and it's already happened. Some of the same people complaining the loudest about money spent on the space program are complaining the loudest about all the companies sending jobs overseas to China. Well, yes a lot of that outsourcing is pure greed and it shouldn't have happened, but you know what? It COULDN'T have happened unless China and India were breeding scientists and engineers like rabbits. You can't outsource the work to India when there's nobody there who can do the work.
I'm not exactly sure what it is anymore that people think they want. Employers only pay the big bucks to the people who can do the work, and when there's not enough people left in the country who can do the work, even the few who can are gonna get shafted. How many people reading this blog know that 2 years ago China successfully launched an unmanned lunar exploration probe? Or that last year they did their first spacewalk? Yes, some of that was Russian space technology. But if the general level of science education in the US keeps dropping, eventually China will be ahead of the US.
It's getting unbelievable. The information is right there in front of them but they can't click the link to connect the dots.
Posted by obicera1 at 11:10 AM : May 15, 2009
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Very interesting reading; a great list of hypotheticals.
Try again.
v.
Posted by iDragon13
You mean this one? Yes, I see it. And I'm communicating with it.
Posted by obicera1 at 11:10 AM : May 15, 2009
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That was fascinating! Thanks for sharing.
Posted by Carvin82604 at 11:50 AM : May 15, 2009
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I'm just amazed that we haven't seen the discussion turn to a great big left-wing vs. right-wing, gun control argument. All the trolls must have left early for the weekend for a change. Whew!
Ever since early man stepped from his cave and looked up with awe at the dense canopy of night stars, he longed to understand more about the world in which he found himself. As he had so little knowlege his life was brief and brutal.
Owing to the Space Program humankind has added immeasurably to our understanding of the universe and our ability to make life more liveable for millions of citizens. Even the military depends on the knowledge garnered about rockets, robotics, propellents, telephony, exotic materials, and aviation to name a few. Countless lives have been saved by the advances in medicine and biology that space research has made possible. Just the Global Positioning System (GPS) has facilitated inestimable advances in geology, cartography, surveillance, navigation, and on and on.
How thin our text books would be and how empty our brains were it not for the curiosity, inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, and brave pioneering spirt of those in the space program.
Posted by displeased at 8:42 AM : May 15, 2009
Right on!!!
Posted by bornin1952
One of the many spinoffs from the Hubble telescope is the use of its Charge Coupled Device (CCD) chips for digital imaging breast biopsies. The device captures images of breast tissue more clearly and efficiently than other existing technologies. The CCD chips are so advanced that they can detect minute differences between a malignant or benign tumor without the need for a surgical biopsy. This saves the patient weeks of recovery time and the cost for this procedure is hundreds of dollars vs. thousands for a surgical biopsy. That's just one example. I could list many more technologies that were developed as a result of space research, including fabrics, materials, electronics, and medicinal, from items such as bar codes and smoke detectors to implantable heart pumps, but you should take the time to read about it yourself.
Amazing the frivolous waste of money of that magnatude while people lose their homes, jobs and more...
Posted by Newster1
Amazing all the benefits we've gained from space programs. And you're complaining about 132 mil when we're spending billions to destroy and rebuild other countries?
We've got a group of folks traveling 100s of miles in space working on a satellite that allows us to look millions of years in the past and millions of years into the future.
The fact that today's cell phones are the size of matchbooks and it contains a laptop is only one of the wonders that have spun off from space exploration. Let your minds soar and see what's possible.
Posted by mrs_trepidatious at 5:50 AM : May 15, 2009
That type of heaven is existing just in your head. And there it will remain.
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