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The crew of the space shuttle Atlantis (L-R) Megan McArthur, John Grunsfeld, Commander Scott Altman, Michael Good, and Andrew Feustel depart with other crew members for launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida - Source: Reuters -
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Seven astronauts who will spend the week repairing the Hubble
Space Telescope have climbed aboard the space shuttle Atlantis as
NASA prepared to launch the craft.
Commander Scott Altman, a veteran of three previous spaceflights,
was first aboard.
He was followed by rookie astronaut Andrew Feustel, 43, and the
rest of the crew: pilot Greg Johnson, 54, flight engineer Megan
McArthur, 37, lead spacewalker John Grunsfeld, 50, and astronauts
Michael Massimino and Michael Good, both 46.
Meteorologists predicted a 90% chance the weather would be suitable
for lift-off, although there was a slight concern about low clouds
at the shuttle's emergency landing site in Spain.
The astronauts plan to spend 11 days in orbit on a final mission to
service the Hubble telescope.
NASA has dispatched space shuttle crews to repair and upgrade
Hubble four times since it was put into orbit in 1990.
But Atlantis' mission is the first since the 2003 Columbia
accident, which changed the way NASA did business.
Among its post-Columbia safety improvements, NASA set up the
International Space Station as an emergency shelter for shuttle
astronauts whose spaceship may be too damaged to attempt the return
flight through Earth's atmosphere.
But Atlantis is heading toward an orbit too far to reach the
outpost, so NASA has a second shuttle poised at the launch site
ready to mount an emergency rescue mission if needed.
The 2003 accident also delayed the fifth house call to Hubble,
leaving the observatory with its main camera sidelined by an
electronics problem, two other instruments shut down, no backups
for a key computer or the positioning system, and 20-year-old
batteries that can only be half charged.
"On this mission, we're going for broke," said Hubble project
scientist David Leckrone.
"We set the bar extraordinarily high for ourselves."
During five spacewalks, astronauts plan to install two new cameras,
repair two of the broken instruments, replace all six positioning
gyroscopes and batteries, shore up the telescope's thermal
insulation and attach a docking ring so that Hubble can be removed
from orbit upon completion of its mission.
NASA hopes that with the upgrades Hubble, which has cost about
US$10 billion so far, will last until at least 2014, at which time
its replacement should be in orbit and operational.
Hubble's observations have been important in all areas of
astronomical research, including the still-unexplained discovery
that the universe is expanding at an increasingly faster rate and
that galaxies formed quite early after the Big Bang explosion that
created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Hubble made the first measurements of gases in the atmosphere of a
planet in another solar system and found evidence that raw
materials for planet formation are very common.
