Long Hubble spacewalk deemed a success

A pair of NASA astronauts performed delicate repairs to an ailing Hubble Space Telescope in a mission that was judged a success despite a number problems with Hubble’s hardware.

Astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good spent seven hours installing four new gyroscopes, but were unable to install two more, even though the job took two hours longer than planned. During the installation of the gyroscopes,  Massimino was hovering inside the telescope itself while Good was working at the end of the Atlantis robot arm. The final two gyroscopes could not be installed because of an alignment problem between the telescope and the devices.

NASA’s Hubble Program Manager Preston Burch said that the inability to install the two other gyroscopes was not a reason to think the repair had failed. He said, “We’ve run the reliability models for all the various possible permutations and combinations of RSUs that might be installed on this mission. And I would say the difference in the projected longevity of the observatory in the out years is very small. We don’t see this is a significant detriment at all to the observatory. This was a tremendous accomplishment for us.”

In addition to the work on the gyroscopes, Massimino and Good had to spend a couple of hours installing three new batteries on the Hubble. At the end of the spacewalk all three new batteries and four new gyroscopes passed initial testing and were deemed good to go, according to a CNET story. That was enough for the mission controllers to announce the success of this second out of five planned spacewalks.

Program manager Burch said, “We are really excited that we’re now two for two with our EVAs. We accomplished everything we set out to do today. We hit some rough spots there, and I think it’s a huge testament to the perseverance and the determination of both our crew as well as our flight director that we got through and accomplished everything we set out to do. It’s thrown us off a little bit in terms of our time schedule, but it looks like we can accommodate that.”

Scenes like this one are quickly coming to an end. The last administration made the decision to retire the remainder of the space shuttle fleet in the very near future and there is not a system ready to replace it. That will bring the near-Earth episode in NASA operations to at least a temporary end, a very sad thing for the space program as a whole.

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