Jan 26 2009
Hubble Space Telescope
This past Friday evening, I went to the Christa McAullife Planetarium to see a program on the Hubble Space Telescope. I knew the spacecraft was having some issues and I wanted to learn more about the telescope and what it was doing. The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in 1990 and after a few corrections to its mirrors and some additional hardware fixes, it has continued to produce high quality images and data for observational study.
The Hubble Space Telescope was named after Edwin P. Hubble, astronomer. It is a space-based orbiting observatory that has produced outstanding deep space images of our solar system and beyond. Image quality is greater than our Earth based observatories as Hubble does not have to contend with atmospheric conditions.
The shuttle has performed three maintenance missions to the telescope and a fourth mission is planned for May 2009. This will be final servicng mission for the telescope and planned updates include the addition and update of some of the instrumentation, and a fix for the platform’s electrical generating system (the primary system has failed, and they are operating on the back up system). For continued updates on the Hubble mission, visit http://hubble.nasa.gov.
Believe it or not, I was the EVA Safety Flight Lead for the last two servicing missions. It’s an incredible device, but the folks that work on it, on the ground and in flight, are some of the best. It’s a tricky item.