Hubble telescope repair photo

Today, seven NASA astronauts returned after a 13-day mission to repair an old Hubble telescope.

The mission was successful: new stabilizing gyroscopes and batteries were installed, two new instruments were installed and two old ones were repaired.

All equipment is working properly, and now the Hubble telescope will be able to perform its functions until at least 2014. No more service crews will be sent to this telescope.

NASA has published a report on the successfully completed mission. We offer you a gallery of the best photos.

The telescope is located at a distance of just over 500 km from the surface of the Earth. The flight to him took two days. On May 13, they managed to catch the structure with the help of a gripper (robotic “arm”), pull it up and fasten it outside the cargo compartment of the Atlantis shuttle.



On the fourth day of the mission, astronauts made the first of five spacewalks. They removed one of the most worn cameras (Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2) from the telescope, which has been working here non-stop since 1993. The photo shows an empty space after removing the module. A new Wide Field Camera 3 camera will be put here later.



During the second sortie to the telescope, the astronauts (one of them is captured in the photo at the end of the long robotic arm that holds the telescope) replaced gyroscopes and half the batteries that had been used for 19 years. Installing a new gyroscope was the main goal of the entire repair mission.



During the third exit, astronauts tried to repair the main camera of the telescope (Advanced Camera for Surveys), which flashed a couple of years ago. They succeeded only partially. They restored the functionality of one of the damaged camera channels, but could not restore the high-resolution sensor. In the photograph, the astronaut carries a box with corrective optics, installed here in 1993, to level out distortions in the main mirror of the Hubble telescope. But since the correction mechanisms are built-in in new tools, this box was removed from the telescope.



The longest space mission took place on the second day of repair work and lasted 8 hours and 2 minutes. Astronauts had to use brute force to tear off the handrail from the case of a broken spectrograph (an unplanned operation took 90 minutes), then unscrew more than 100 screws, penetrate inside and change the camera, broken in 2004 due to electricity problems.



To have time to do everything on the last day of repair work, on May 18, the astronauts began work in the early morning (the rays of the morning sun are visible in the photo). They replaced the remaining batteries and some degraded sections of the insulation (how many were in time), and also replaced the main gyroscope.



After the repair, the scientific instrument was released back into orbit.



Weather problems at the proposed landing site in Florida forced the shuttle to spend another two days in orbit, and the landing was postponed until May 24 at another airfield at a military base in California.



From there, the shuttle was brought to the Florida base by Boeing 747 cargo plane. On June 1 they stopped for a day in Texas, and only on June 2 the weather allowed them to return back to the base.



via New Scientist