The Trouble Repairing Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most invaluable resources astronomers have. However, during normal wear and tear in space, it has become battered and partially dysfunctional. A brave group of astronauts launched in the shuttle Atlantis for the fifth, final, and trickiest trip to fix the telescope.

The repair mission will involve bringing the telescope close by the shuttle, in order to perform five spacewalks. During some of these, the astronauts will be required, for the first time, to open up some of the technologically-advanced gear and attempt to fix it from the inside. Think of it like opening up your laptop and tinkering with the guts, all while suited up in the enormous protective gear the astronauts need to wear to protect themselves from the harsh space environment.

Even simple things, like removing and re-screwing screws, are difficult in space. The screws must be rounded, since, in the absence of gravity, once they are freed from the telescope itself, they could become dangerous projectiles. Taking things like this into account, then, special equipment will be used to accomplish the tasks at hand.

While the idea of spacewalking may sound romantic, keep in mind that these astronauts will be answerable at all times to the control center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Goddard Space Flight Institute has a 550-point checklist of things that must be accomplished on this trip, and they have to have the timing down exactly.

"We have this choreographed almost down to the minute of what we want the crew to do. It's this really fine ballet," said Keith Walyus, the servicing mission operations manager at Goddard.

The mission was originally slotted for 2004, but was scrapped due to concerns about the astronauts' safety. Since then, the Hubble Space Telescope has been left adrift, doomed to die in orbit without maintenance. Schoolchidren's pleas to NASA were finally heard in 2006, and the mission was rescheduled.

Launched on April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some of the most beautiful and intricate photographs of space ever seen. One of its most famous initial discoveries was the so-called

"Hubble Deep Field," which occurred when the super-sensitive telescope was pointed at a blank area of sky and left to expose slowly. What was observed was a huge collection of thousands of points of light, each one a galaxy. The Hubble Deep Field was the first best picture we had of what the Universe looked like very soon after the Big Bang occurred.

Astronauts Ready For Repair Trip to Battered Hubble, www.washingtonpost.com