Shuttle Crew Prepares a Long-Delayed Last Goodbye for Hubble
Posted on Tuesday, May 05 @ 02:32:18 CEST by Raulken |
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By DENNIS OVERBYE NASA is set to try again to carry out one last long-delayed shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. On May 11, if all continues to go well, a crew led by Scott Altman will blast off on the space shuttle Atlantis on an 11-day ...
 Published: May 4, 2009 NASA is set to try again to carry out one last long-delayed shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Skip to next paragraph Multimedia Interactive Graphic A Final Visit Audio Slide Show The Hubble Repairman On May 11, if all continues to go well, a crew led by Scott Altman will blast off on the space shuttle Atlantis on an 11-day maintenance and repair mission that they say is the most daunting yet. It will be the last of these voyages that have kept the storied telescope the pride of astronomy. Standing by on a nearby launching pad in case Atlantis gets in trouble is another shuttle, Endeavour, ready to blast off on a week’s notice and pluck the Atlantis astronauts down from the sky. Commander Altman’s crew is armed with 116 new tools built specially for this trip, and a shuttle full of spare parts and new instruments that will take five spacewalks to install. If they succeed, the telescope will be left at the peak of its powers. The astronauts will not be back. The shuttle is to be retired in 2010, but Hubble should be able to continue sending cosmic postcards until 2014, long enough to overlap in orbit with its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers hope to pull out all the stops for those last five years, which David Leckrone, the Hubble project scientist,...
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