Photos of repair work on the Hubble telescope

Today, seven NASA astronauts have returned from a 13-day mission to repair the old Hubble telescope.

The mission was completed successfully: new stabilizing gyroscopes and batteries were installed, two new instruments were installed and two old ones were repaired.

All equipment works fine, and now the Hubble telescope will be able to perform its functions until at least 2014. No more service teams will be sent to this telescope.
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NASA has published a report on a successfully completed mission. We offer you a gallery of the best photos.

The telescope is located at a distance of just over 500 km from the surface of the Earth. The flight to him took two days. On May 13, the construction was managed to be captured with the help of a gripper (robotic “hand”), tightened and fastened outside the cargo compartment of the shuttle Atlantis.



On the fourth day of the mission, astronauts made the first of five spacewalks. They removed one of the most worn-out cameras from the telescope (Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2), which has been working non-stop here since 1993. The photo shows an empty space after the removal of the module. This will later put a new camera Wide Field Camera 3.



During the second sortie to the telescope, astronauts (one of them is captured in the photo at the end of a long robotic arm that holds the telescope) replaced the gyroscopes and half of the batteries that have worked for 19 years. Installing a new gyroscope was the main goal of the entire repair mission.



During the third release, the astronauts tried to repair the main camera of the telescope (Advanced Camera for Surveys), which went berserk a couple of years ago. This they managed only partially. They restored the performance of one of the damaged camera channels, but they could not restore the high-resolution sensor. In the photo, an astronaut carries a box with correction optics, installed here in 1993, to level distortion in the main mirror of the Hubble telescope. But since the correction tools are built-in in the new instruments, this box was removed from the telescope.



The longest sortie into space occurred on the second day of repair work and lasted 8 hours and 2 minutes. The astronauts had to use brute force to tear off the rail from the body of the broken spectrograph (an unplanned operation took 90 minutes), then unscrew more than 100 screws, get inside and change the camera that was broken in 2004 due to problems with electricity.



In order to have time to do everything on the last day of repair work, on May 18 astronauts began work in the early morning hours (in the photo you can see the rays of the morning sun). They replaced the remaining batteries and some degraded areas of isolation (as they had time), and also replaced the main gyroscope.



After repair, the scientific instrument was released back into orbit.



Problems with the weather at the proposed landing site in Florida forced the shuttle to spend another two days in orbit, and the landing was postponed to another airfield on May 24 at a military base in California.



From there, a shuttle was transported to a base in Florida on a Boeing 747 cargo plane. On June 1, they stopped for a day in Texas, and only on June 2, the weather allowed them to return to the base.



via New Scientist