Space shuttle astronauts plucked the Hubble Space Telescope from orbit on Wednesday and tucked the observatory into their ship’s cargo bay for a long-overdue overhaul.
Speeding through space, commander Scott Altman maneuvered the shuttle Atlantis to within about 10m of the telescope as fellow astronaut Megan McArthur used the ship’s robot arm to latch on to the telescope at 1:14pm as the spacecraft soared high above Australia.
“Houston, Atlantis. Hubble has arrived onboard Atlantis,” Altman radioed to Mission Control.
NASA last visited the Hubble in 2002 and had planned to return for a fifth servicing call a couple of years later, but the destruction of the shuttle Columbia as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2003 derailed those plans.
Atlantis sustained no serious damage during its launch on Monday. Scratches across four heat shield tiles on the right wing that were discovered during an in-flight inspection on Tuesday are not considered a danger.
Three of the telescope’s five science instruments are broken and it is using its last set of positioning gyroscopes, a backup computer for formatting data to relay to the ground and 19-year-old batteries that can only hold half a charge.
Astronauts plan five consecutive days of spacewalks to outfit the Hubble with new imagers and other gear and fix two of its broken cameras. Telescope operators also hope to resurrect an infrared camera after the telescope is released back into orbit.
If the refurbishments are successful, the Hubble should be back in service in two to three months with an observation program even more ambitious than what it has accomplished since its debut in 1990.
Hubble has provided evidence of how planets are formed and has contributed to the still-unexplained realization that the universe is expanding at an increasingly fast rate.
It also offered a front-row seat when a comet smashed into Jupiter and made the first measurements of gases in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system.
NASA hopes the improvements will keep the Hubble operational until at least 2014 so it can work in tandem with its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope.
The first spacewalk was scheduled for yesterday.
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