HST SM4: Last Mission to Hubble
08.29.08
Michael Weiss, HST Deputy Program Manager: It’s our last shot. It’s the fifth and final time. It’s our last shot to extend Hubble’s life and bring it to the apex of it’s scientific capability.
John Grunsfeld, EVA Astronaut, HST SM4: And we just have lots of things we want to repair on Hubble, and upgrade on Hubble and not a lot of time to do it.
Michael Weiss, HST Deputy Program Manager: And we are going to take up everything we can take up, and on this flight it’s about twenty-three thousand pounds of hardware.
David Leckrone, HST Chief Scientist: This is going to be a very exciting, complicated and challenging mission. We have seven brave astronauts who’ve made a conscious decision to risk their lives in order to continue the advancement of science that Hubble has begun. They’re going to buy another five, perhaps ten more years of lifetime for this great telescope.
Preston Burch, HST Program Manager: We’ve got a full plate of things to do. We’ve got major science upgrades that we are going to do. So, we have two new science instruments that we are going to install.
John Grunsfeld, EVA Astronaut, HST SM4: We’re going to put in the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. And this is, you know, the fanciest spectrograph that has ever been put into Hubble.
David Leckrone, HST Chief Scientist: COS plus Hubble together, will be able to observe deeper across the universe than any other instrument of this kind has ever done before.
Michael Weiss, HST Deputy Program Manager: We’re going to install the Wide Field Camera 3, Hubble’s new imager.
Ed Cheung, WFC3 Electrical Lead: Wide Field Camera 3’s discovery factor is about tem times better than the current instruments that we have on Hubble.
One of the beautiful things about our new camera the Wide Field Camera 3 is, it will be capable of looking further out across the universe and farther back in time, and closer to the big bang than any other camera we’ve ever had on Hubble before.
Michael Weiss, HST Deputy Program Manager: We’re also going to attempt two repairs of the two failed instruments on board Hubble: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and STIS.
David Leckrone, HST Chief Scientist: ACS was inserted on Hubble in 2002. Before it died, it was the most heavily used instrument on Hubble. And, STIS was our first black hole hunter and it went on to do the first detection and chemical analysis of the atmosphere of a planet around another star. We want to keep on doing that kind of work when STIS comes back on line.
Preston Burch, HST Program Manager: This will be the first time that we’ve ever done an in-situ repair of science instruments. So this will be a big challenge.
Mike Massimino, EVA Astronaut, HST SM4: In fact there is a hundred and ten of these very small screws that we need to remove from the instrument in order to gain access to the board we need to replace. And in space, things float and debris is a real issue.
David Leckrone, HST Chief Scientist: If we’re successful in repairing these two science instruments that have failed, it will be a real triumph for NASA engineering and will point the way toward our ability in the future to repair instruments in space.
We want Hubble to last a while longer as a spacecraft and since this will be our last opportunity to go service it we’re going to do things like change out all the gyroscopes that help Hubble point. We’re going to put in a new fine guidance sensor. I say a “new” fine guidance sensor; in fact it’s a refurbished fine guidance sensor. It’s one that’s been on Hubble before and been brought back to Earth, refurbished it so it’s a “used” fine guidance sensor but a, “first class.”
We’re going to change out our batteries. We’ve never put in new batteries since Hubble was launched.
Preston Burch, HST Program Manager: We have some insulation repair work that needs to be done.
Teri Gregory, HST SM4 Thermal Systems Lead: We’re going to install a New Outer Blanket Layer called a NOBL. Which is a solid. It’s a blanket anymore; it’s a solid sheet that will go over the blanket.
And, we’ll also be installing a soft capture mechanism on the aft bulkhead of Hubble that will help facilitate a future mission to Hubble primarily for the purpose of deorbiting it at the end of it’s useful life.
David Leckrone, HST Chief Scientist: The two repaired scientific instruments working in tandem with the two new instruments that we are going to put on board Hubble in this mission will enable scientists to tackle some of the most profound issues facing modern science, not just astronomy but physics today.
This in my mind means that when the astronauts leave Hubble after Servicing Mission 4, it will be at the absolute apex of its capabilities. It will be better than it’s ever been before.
› View now
