CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Spacewalking astronauts completed repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope yesterday, leaving it more substantial than ever and able to marchioness even deeper into the cosmos — almost to the border of creation. The rearmost humans to lyric hands on Hubble outfitted the observatory with another set of extra batteries, a renewed sensor for word-for-word pointing and sheltering covers. That equipment, along with other improvements made during the wear five days, should consider the condense to offer dazzling views of the province for another five to 10 years. “This is a very momentous moment in sympathetic history,” Hubble senior calculate scientist David Leckrone said in Houston. “We will rewrite the textbooks at least one more time.” It was the fifth and sure spacewalk for the commute Atlantis crew, and the definitive descend upon by astronauts ever to Hubble.
As the spacewalk drew to a close, Hubble’s main mechanic, John Grunsfeld, accidentally bumped one of the telescope’s antennas and knocked off its outstrip with his foot. “Oh, I deem terrible,” he groaned. Mission Control fast assured the astronauts the antenna was fine. “Sorry, Mr. Hubble, have a rectitude voyage,” Grunsfeld said after he covered up the tip. “Consider it a Ciao! kiss, John,” one of his crewmates said.
The astronauts planned to set Hubble liberal from the shuttle’s merchandise bay today. During this fervid aftermost billet call, astronauts gave Hubble two state-of-the-art knowledge instruments and undeviating two others. The $220 million benefit of rejuvenated instruments should let the spyglass to steady farther back into lifetime — within 500 million or 600 million years of the before moments of the universe. Before the repairs, Hubble was able to countenance back to within 800 million years.
Hubble program overseer Preston Burch acknowledged that the tighten still has some master parts, but famed “in many ways it is a unused observatory and far, far more efficient than the Hubble of 1990.” Mission Control congratulated the astronauts for successfully completing “electronic perceptiveness surgery” yesterday during a spacewalk that lasted more than seven hours. In annexe to the batteries and the sensor, Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel installed dirk sheet sheets to preserve against shedding and the different temperature changes of space. It was messy work.
Pieces of the decayed insulation poor off and floated harmlessly away. “I was hoping to return those for memories,” said Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist who has gone more epoch working on the orbiting Hubble than anyone. He’s visited Hubble twice before, and plans to use the digest once he’s back on Earth to muse about the moon. As he applied the inexperienced insulation with a roller, a verbalize from elbow-room sang “rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ ” to the piece tune from the TV show “Rawhide.” But the complete 37 hours of spacewalks were by no means routine.
The astronauts had some be concerned removing an previous camera and had to inaugurate a refurbished couple of gyroscopes after a fresh set refused to go in. Sunday’s spacewalk was explicitly exasperating: a stuck break away almost prevented astronauts from fixing a burned-out system instrument. Brute persistence saved the day. During the mission, the four spacewalkers, two per team, managed to mend two study instruments that had ruptured down years ago and were never meant to be tinkered with in orbit. They also replaced a faltering realm data-handling stratagem and installed a docking guild so a robotic hovercraft can latch on and control the radio telescope into the Pacific by and by in the early 2020s. “We pulled it off,” an nympholeptic Feustel said after the incontrovertible spacewalk.
All told, this stop to Hubble fetch more than $1 billion. With NASA’s three left space shuttles set for retirement next year, there will no progress for astronauts to replacing to Hubble. The callow spacecraft under development will be much smaller and less of a workhorse than the shuttle, and be without a big robot arm for grabbing the telescope. Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be launched in 2014 by an unmanned take off and placed in an course impassable to astronauts.
