{"id":16371,"date":"2015-04-24T23:01:27","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T15:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/high-flying-tune-ups-gave-us-the-hubble-generation\/"},"modified":"2015-04-24T23:01:27","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T15:01:27","slug":"high-flying-tune-ups-gave-us-the-hubble-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/high-flying-tune-ups-gave-us-the-hubble-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"High-flying tune-ups gave us the Hubble generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR ASTRONOMY NOW & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"The
The Hubble Space Telescope in the payload bay of space shuttle Atlantis during the last servicing mission in May 2009. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can thank thousands of thinkers \u2014 unafraid to get their hands dirty \u2014 for the steady diet of discoveries and jaw-dropping vistas produced by the Hubble Space Telescope over the last quarter-century.<\/p>\n

Engineers, scientists, craftsmen and astronauts repeatedly devised ways to transform a flawed, aging observatory into a state-of-the-art research instrument, breathing new life into Hubble each time it needed a rejuvenating jolt of new technology.<\/p>\n

Five Hubble repair missions launched on four of NASA\u2019s iconic reusable space shuttles from 1993 until 2009, rescuing the telescope more than 300 miles above Earth and adding new capabilities not even imagined when Hubble was still on the ground. The telescope responded by throwing hurdles in the path of spacewalking astronauts, forcing crews and mission control to respond with ingenious \u2014 and sometimes forceful \u2014 solutions.<\/p>\n

For a generation of astronomers, students and global citizens \u2014 and like the cornerstone discovery of the telescope\u2019s namesake \u2014 Hubble has been a constant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not only a science mission, but I think Hubble is the people\u2019s telescope,\u201d says John Grunsfeld, a former Hubble repairman and now chief of NASA\u2019s science division.<\/p>\n

Grunsfeld flew on five space shuttle missions, including three servicing missions to Hubble, then held a leadership post at the Space Telescope Science Institute managing the telescope\u2019s science program. He was appointed associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate in January 2012, nearly three years after his last visit to Hubble.<\/p>\n

\u201cHands down, the most rewarding part of working on Hubble was being a small part of the awesome team of out-of-the-box thinkers,\u201d says Ed Rezac, an engineer at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center who helped plan some of the most intricate Hubble repair tasks. \u201cThe personalities, the talent, the imaginations that came together to pull off that magic that today continues to amaze and educate with new discoveries. To have been a part of that wonderful endeavor is a dreamer\u2019s dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody associates with it,\u201d Grunsfeld says of the social and scientific capital accrued by Hubble since its launch in April 1990. \u201cWhen I started at NASA in 1992, one of my jobs was actually working on that first servicing mission, and at that time, there were lots of people who didn\u2019t know about Hubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many in the public first learned about Hubble as a punchline to jokes and the subject of congressional investigations after scientists discovered an error in the shape of the telescope\u2019s 7.9-foot main mirror.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were cartoons of the great disasters of history. Right next to the Hindenburg was Hubble. Yes, it was a disaster,\u201d former astronaut Jeff Hoffman, an astrophysicist who flew on the space shuttle Endeavour\u2019s repair mission to Hubble in 1993, said in 2009. \u201cNASA\u2019s reputation was really on the line. It was a disaster for NASA. It was a disaster for the astronomy community. So many people had worked on Hubble, and so many other people were planning to use Hubble. It\u2019s really hard to know what would have happened had we not been able to fix Hubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ground teams devised new instruments to correct the flaw \u2014 called spherical aberration \u2014 opening the gates for a campaign of scientific discovery now in its third decade.<\/p>\n

\"NASA
NASA released this image to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Hubble\u2019s launch. The sparkling centerpiece of Hubble\u2019s anniversary fireworks is a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina. Credit: NASA\/ESA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhen I go out and talk now \u2014 say to college students \u2014 virtually everyone in the audience except for the faculty members has been born since Hubble started doing science,\u201d Grunsfeld tells Astronomy Now. \u201cAll the kids in high school and in college are the Hubble generation. That\u2019s a neat thing to think about. They\u2019ve only known a world with the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four servicing missions by space shuttles followed the 1993 repair mission, improving Hubble\u2019s capabilities, replacing failed and obsolete components, and giving the observatory a new lease on life expected to last into the 2020s.<\/p>\n

Space shuttle Discovery reached the telescope in February 1997, carrying a seven-man crew to swap out two aging spectroscopy instruments and replace them with a new imaging spectrograph named STIS and a near-infrared camera called NICMOS, extending Hubble\u2019s vision into a new area of the electromagnetic spectrum.<\/p>\n

Discovery grappled Hubble after a two-day chase following launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and using more than 150 tools and crew aids, the shuttle\u2019s astronauts completed five spacewalks in five days. In addition to the added instruments, the STS-82 mission installed a new sensor to keep Hubble stable when pointed toward astronomical targets, swapped out a data recorder and a reaction wheel, and fabricated thermal insulation panels on the fly when astronauts noticed the observatory\u2019s outer blankets were cracking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point of the Hubble servicing mission that I was on was not to fix Hubble, but to improve it,\u201d Steve Hawley, who operated Discovery\u2019s robot arm on the STS-82 mission, told NASA historians in an oral history interview. \u201cBy then it was working fine, but we were now realizing the original design promise of Hubble, as technology improved on the ground, there\u2019d be a way to incorporate it in the telescope on orbit and keep it state-of-the-art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some worried the repairs could inadvertently break something on Hubble.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was some discussion in the community, before the mission, whether it was worth taking the risk to improve Hubble,\u201d Hawley says. \u201cOf course, that had always been the plan, and that was what, of course, everyone decided to do. But that was characteristic of some of the thinking that was going on: \u2018Hey, this is working great. Maybe we shouldn\u2019t mess with it.\u2019 But the point was to be able to mess with it so that you could continue to make it a modern telescope. So we were happy to be able to show you could really do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Astronaut
Astronaut Steve Hawley at the controls of space shuttle Discovery\u2019s robotic arm during the second Hubble repair flight in 1997. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1999, when Discovery again launched on another repair mission to Hubble, the observatory was again on the verge of failing.<\/p>\n

Four of Hubble\u2019s six gyroscopes, which pivot the telescope to point toward stars and galaxies, had failed by the time Discovery lifted off in December on an urgent maintenance mission that spanned the Christmas holiday.<\/p>\n

The 1999 repair flight \u2014 named STS-103 \u2014 marked Grunsfeld\u2019s first visit to Hubble.<\/p>\n

Science operations with Hubble were suspended by the time Discovery reached the telescope, and astronauts mounted three spacewalks to restore the observatory to full working order, replacing gyroscopes, a radio transmitter, and a computer with a then-new Intel 486 microchip, representing an upgrade with 20 times the processing speed and six times the memory of the older unit.<\/p>\n

For Grunsfeld, the Hubble repair mission in 1999 marked the first of eight spacewalks of his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just seemed so fantastic that, for a moment, I felt like I had to pinch myself to make sure it was true, but I couldn\u2019t,\u201d Grunsfeld says. \u201cI just reached out with my arm and my index finger and touched the Hubble, kind of symbolically doing a, \u2018This is too good to be true\u2019 moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the STS-103 flight did not add any new capabilities to Hubble, it was imperative to bring the observatory back to the forefront of astronomy, so important that NASA elected to launch the mission sooner than planned in response to failures aboard the telescope.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe felt that was an incredible gift to everybody on planet Earth, to be able to deploy Hubble for Christmas as a working telescope, because it hadn\u2019t been working before,\u201d Grunsfeld says.<\/p>\n

Then came the first of Hubble\u2019s two 21st century scientific tune-ups.<\/p>\n

Space shuttle Columbia rocketed into orbit in March 2002, reached Hubble two days later, then installed a new camera, repaired another instrument, and replaced the observatory\u2019s power-generating solar arrays, giving the telescope perhaps its most wholesale upgrade since the first servicing mission in 1993.<\/p>\n

\"Astronaut
Ground controllers switched off the Hubble Space Telescope for an unprecedented repair on space shuttle Columbia\u2019s flight to the observatory in 2002. Spacewalkers swapped out the heart of Hubble\u2019s power system \u2014 the power control unit \u2014 in a repair never designed to be conducted in space. Astronaut John Grunsfeld is seen here working on the unit. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Advanced Camera for Surveys had twice the field-of-view of Hubble\u2019s previous camera, and scientists heralded the new instrument\u2019s capability, saying it increased the observatory\u2019s potential for new discoveries by a factor of ten. Sensitive to near-infrared, visible and ultraviolet light, the ACS allowed astronomers using Hubble to observe galaxies in the young universe, study how stars and planets form out of filaments of dust, and watch planets in our own solar system.<\/p>\n

Hubble\u2019s main infrared camera, installed by astronauts in 1997, also got a new lease on life on Columbia\u2019s 2002 mission. Grunsfeld and Rick Linnehan replaced the NICMOS instrument\u2019s cryogenic cooler, which ceased operating in early 1999, with an experimental refrigerator-like device to cool the camera\u2019s infrared detectors and make them sensitive to see some of the coldest pockets in the universe.<\/p>\n

Grunsfeld singled out the repair as one of his favorite moments from his three missions to Hubble.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were having a devil of a time getting a radiator on the side of the telescope that didn\u2019t fit,\u201d says Grunsfeld. \u201cIt was supposed to fit easily, and we tried and tried, and with all our strength, we couldn\u2019t get it on. Finally, we made one more go of it and it latched into place. It was just surprising that we had to manhandle it that way, when everything else on Hubble is like delicate brain surgery. Here we were using the brute force of a human being to try to correct a slight misalignment, and try to get something to fit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hubble\u2019s future was in doubt after the loss of Columbia and a seven-person crew on a scientific research flight in 2003, grounding the space shuttle program for two-and-a-half years. As officials planned the shuttle\u2019s return-to-flight, NASA decided to cancel the next repair mission to Hubble, concluding the flight was unsafe because astronauts could not take refuge in the International Space Station in the event of damage to the shuttle\u2019s heat shield, which brought down Columbia.<\/p>\n

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who took over the space agency\u2019s top post in 2005, reversed the decision and engineers crafted an elaborate rescue plan, in which the shuttle Atlantis would fly to the observatory and another shuttle would be on standby on the launch pad to rescue the Atlantis crew if required.<\/p>\n

Atlantis launched on the fifth shuttle servicing flight to Hubble in May 2009, again with Grunsfeld on-board.<\/p>\n

\"Astronaut
Astronaut Drew Feutel is perched on the end of the space shuttle\u2019s robotic arm during the 2009 Hubble repair mission. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rezac says the 2009 flight was his \u201cpersonal favoriate servicing mission \u2014 and in my opinion, most likely one of the most ambitious manned space flights, in terms of mission objectives, ever flown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grunsfeld and his six crewmates trained for nearly three years \u2014 much longer than the typical shuttle crew \u2014 learning the ins and outs of Hubble, developing and practicing procedures, and rehearsing for a rescue by another shuttle should something go wrong.<\/p>\n

Their work included the addition of two new revolutionary instruments to bolster the heart of Hubble\u2019s scientific prowess. The Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph replaced two instruments launched in 1993, which Atlantis returned to Earth for display in museums.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Hubble\u2019s new camera, the Wide Field Camera 3, we\u2019ve been able to study Andromeda, the closest galaxy to us, in such detail that we\u2019re able to map out individual stars \u2014 millions and millions of stars \u2014 and study them the way we study stars in our galaxy,\u201d says Grunsfeld.<\/p>\n

Two teams of spacewalkers also broke into the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph for repairs the instruments were never designed to receive, requiring the design of new tools just for one job.<\/p>\n

Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel got the orders to repair the ACS instrument, with the warning that even a minor slip-up could jeopardize the entire Hubble Space Telescope.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked so closely with people on the ground \u2026 on how to repair an instrument that hadn\u2019t been designed to be repaired,\u201d says Grunsfeld. \u201cThat involved cutting through aluminum, that involved taking out tiny screws and not losing them, then pulling out circuit boards. At any stage, it all could have gone wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

In all, astronauts went outside on 23 spacewalks to maintain Hubble. With the help of engineers like Rezac, shuttle crews positioned Hubble for discoveries once never envisioned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got all that done, and when we deployed Hubble, I was just so happy,\u201d says Grunsfeld. \u201cHubble was in the greatest shape ever, and we sent it off to hopefully a long life.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for a 30-year anniversary in 2020?<\/p>\n

\u201cSo far, so good,\u201d Grunsfeld says. \u201cWe\u2019ve made it six years since 2009. I think Hubble will last quite a bit longer. The chances are pretty good at getting to 30 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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