CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Atlantis’ astronauts grabbed the Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday, then quickly set their sights on the difficult, dangerous and unprecedented spacewalking repairs they will attempt over the next five days.
Hubble and Atlantis are flying in a 350-mile-high orbit littered with space junk. Some of that debris put a bit of a scare into NASA late Wednesday, when a 4-inch piece was spotted on a path coming close to the shuttle.
The debris did not hit the spacecraft and NASA had decided it didn’t need to move Atlantis out of the way.
Left over from the 2007 Chinese destruction of a satellite during a weapon test, the debris was predicted to come within 1.7 miles of Atlantis. Mission Control let it pass by without noting it.
The international space station also is watching a different piece of debris at its lower altitude that has a slight chance of coming close on Friday.
The shuttle already has an ugly stretch of nicks from Monday’s launch, but the damage is considered minor and poses no safety threat. NASA continued to prep another shuttle, though, just in case Atlantis is damaged and the crew needs to be rescued.
Mission Control told astronauts that engineers determined Atlantis’ heat shield was in such good shape that no extra inspection would be needed next week.
Flight controllers gasped when the telescope that had been in orbital solitude for seven years first came into view.
“It’s an unbelievably beautiful sight,” said John Grunsfeld, the telescope’s chief repairman. “Amazingly, the exterior of Hubble, an old man of 19 years in space, still looks in fantastic shape.”
NASA hopes to get another five to 10 years of dazzling views of the cosmos with all the planned upgrades, which should leave the observatory more powerful than ever.
Shuttle robot arm operator Megan McArthur used the 50-foot boom to seize the school bus-sized telescope. Then she lowered the observatory into Atlantis’ payload bay, where cameras checked it out.
“Everybody’s very excited up here, I can tell you,” said Grunsfeld, who will venture out today with Andrew Feustel. They will replace an old camera that’s the size of a baby grand piano, and a science data-handling unit that failed in September and delayed Atlantis’ flight by seven months.
This is the fifth time astronauts have called upon Hubble. The previous overhauls went well, but those repairs were straightforward, with spacewalkers pulling equipment in and out. This time, Grunsfeld and his team will venture into the guts of broken instruments.
“Don’t hold us to too high a standard,” NASA space operations chief Ed Weiler warned before Monday’s launch. “We’re trying to do two things that we’ve never done before, take apart instruments that aren’t designed to be taken apart in space and operated on by gloved astronauts, and fix them after pulling out 110 or 111 screws.
Two teams of astronauts — two men per team — will take turns stepping outside. Besides swapping out the camera and science data unit, they will replace Hubble’s batteries, gyroscopes and a pointing mechanism. They also will install fresh covers on the telescope, along with a docking ring so a future spacecraft can guide the telescope into the Pacific Ocean sometime in the early 2020s.
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