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The fifth and final mission to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope
was a long time coming.
After a delay in the fall of 2008, spring brought new hope.
And, on 11th May, the 7 Space Shuttle crew members
headed for the mission of a lifetime.
This is the Hubblecast.
News and images from the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
EPISODE 29 Mission Accomplished: Healing Hubble.
At 19 years old, Hubble is 'the' veteran of space telescopes.
Opening our eyes to the Universe that hosts us,
Hubble has looked far and deep
to reveal fundamental scientific truths.
Hubble isn't without its battle scars
but the latest servicing mission has left it more capable than ever.
Astronauts had just five spacewalks
to complete the Herculean tasks set before them:
the installation of two completely new instruments
and the repair of two others.
And not to mention hundreds of smaller, but still vital, tasks.
These kind of 'space mechanics' was never intended
and likely never even dreamed of by Hubble's creators in the 1970s.
A dedicated team of ESA engineers headed to the U.S.
to support the mission by ensuring the solar arrays' drive electronics
and mechanisms were functioning properly.
The very lifeblood of Hubble, the panels, must be monitored constantly
so that astronauts can do the work that they need to do
while avoiding damage to the panels themselves.
But before anyone could support the mission,
it first had to get off the ground.
A bright, clear and powerfully hot morning with very few clouds
looked promising for an on-time departure.
Invited guests, scientists and engineers and the press
gathered across Kennedy Space Center
to watch Space Shuttle Atlantis rise with the hope of rejuvenating Hubble.
At 20:01 on May 11, Atlantis roared off the launch pad
and into the sky on its way to its historic rendezvous.
After Atlantis was safely in the air
and all that was left was its trail of smoke,
the ESA Hubble Space Telescope team moved north
to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland,
were engineers there man the STOCC,
the Space Telescope Operations Control Center.
There, the ESA team worked closely with the Goddard team
to ensure both the safety of space-walking astronauts
and the solar panels.
Astronauts put in over 36 hours of space walks during the 13-day mission.
The workhorse WFPC2 camera was replaced
by its more powerful descendant, the WFC3, or Wide Field Camera 3.
WFC3 will greatly enhance the observational capabilities of Hubble,
providing enhanced field of view and broader waveband.
Removing a refrigerator-sized instrument is no small task.
Astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel
removed Hubble's COSTAR package that was no longer needed
to make way for the new Cosmic Origin Spectrograph, COS.
COS will study the large-scale structure of the Universe
and the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars and planets.
It will also help determine the formation of elements
considered essential for life, such as carbon and iron.
Astronauts didn't just perform transplant surgery.
They also did corrective operations
on two existing instruments with great success.
The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, STIS
that combines a camera with a spectrograph
and covers a wide range of wavelengths
from the near infrared region into the ultraviolet
was affected by a power failure.
Astronauts had a particularly difficult time repairing STIS
due to a stubborn bolt on the instrument's handrail.
But after Houston gave astronaut Mike Massimino
the go-ahead to use "brute force",
he was able to break the handrail and access STIS.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys, another of Hubble's workhorse instrument,
was also down due to a power failure.
The Servicing Mission 4 repair has brought it new life.
As astronaut Megan McArthur released Hubble from the Shuttle's grip
and the pilots carefully manoeuvred away,
it was a bittersweet moment for the astronauts
as well as the NASA and ESA support personnel on the ground,
the last time humans would visit the telescope that has taught us so much
about our origin and our place in the vast Universe.
Hubblecast is produced by ESA / Hubble
at the European Southern Observatory in Germany.
The Hubble mission is a project of international cooperation
between NASA and the European Space Agency.
Don't miss
www.eso.org/esocast
Now that you've caught up with Hubble
make sure to get the latest from the ground too.
The ESOCast highlights the best of the European Southern Observatory
and its powerful telescopes that observe from high in the Chilean Andes
at the southern hemisphere's best known sites for astronomical observations.