In this NASA photo, astronaut Mike Massimino is seen through a window of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on Sunday, May 17, 2009, during the mission's fourth session of extravehicular activity as work continued on refurbishing and upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope. (AP)
One week ago, way out in space, 350 miles above Earth, the space shuttle Atlantis snagged the Hubble Space Telescope, traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, for some in-depth rehab.
Today, the Atlantis crew gently released Hubble back into its heavenly orbit. In between, the seven astronauts pulled off the most daring repair job in the history of space flight. Floating, weightless, stars behind them, Earth below, inside their big space suits, handling hundreds of screws, a 13-ton telescope, and the physics of space.
This hour, On Point: The amazing nitty gritty of repairing Hubble.
You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Joe Tanner joins us from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A former astronaut, he flew to the Hubble Space Telescope in February 1997 and performed two spacewalks to do repair and upgrade work on the telescope. He has gone into space four times aboard the space shuttles Atlantis, Endeavour and Discovery, and has done a total of six spacewalks. He retired from NASA in 2008 and now teaches engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Louis Friedman joins us from Pasadena, California. He is co-founder and executive director of the Planetary Society. From 1970 to 1980, he was involved in planning deep space missions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His projects included, Mariner-Venus-Mercury, Voyager, Venus Orbital Imaging Radar (Magellan), Halley Comet Rendezvous-Solar Sail and the Mars Program. He is the author of “Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Flight.”
Traci Watson, NASA reporter for USA Today.
Dava Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. She’s principal engineer and designer of an advanced spacesuit concept called the BioSuit, which is being designed for future trips to the Moon and Mars.
More links:
See NASA’s official page for the Hubble servicing mission. Also worth a visit is its main Hubble page, which has sections on Hubble science, Hubble history, and loads of multimedia.
Tags: space
One name I’ll always associate with the HST is Story Musgrave.
As beloved as the HST is, with the grand data gathered during her last hurrah our energies should get focused on what possibilities the NGST (next generation space telescope) promise astronomers.
Posted by Frederic C., on May 19th, 2009 at 11:46 pm UTCDo you worry about radiation or debris?
Posted by Peter J. Jensen, on May 20th, 2009 at 10:39 am UTCCan you tell us about how computers aide in the mission?
Posted by Peter J. Jensen, on May 20th, 2009 at 10:43 am UTCJust so you know, the audio on this live program is looping every 30 seconds or so–each speaker’s statements are repeated.
Posted by Emily, on May 20th, 2009 at 10:52 am UTCAs if the Space Program was not already a big enough waste of your tax money, leave it to a space egg-head to suggest that it’s a good idea to spend many millions more to turn the Hubble into an orbiting museum. Please disregard the fact that no one on Earth will ever see it and keep your tax money coming.
Posted by FRizzo, on May 20th, 2009 at 11:17 am UTCthis show was so great,will the new pictures from the hubble be featured in NATGEO
Posted by Mike, on May 20th, 2009 at 11:53 am UTCHi Frizzo,
Posted by Alex, on May 20th, 2009 at 6:47 pm UTCYou need to get some perspective on costs. An F16 costs 150 million. Iraq is costing us 2 billion a week! We could do so so much in scientific research with tiny offsets in our military spending. The LHC particle accelerator, largely funded by the Europeans, is an enormous project and is extremely costly as physics experiments go.) It will cost about 4-8 billion in total, a month in Iraq…
Alex
Hi Tom, great show, but I think you were mis-pronouncing astronaut Mike Massomino’s name (not Mass-imo)
Posted by Tim, on May 20th, 2009 at 7:41 pm UTCI just returned from a trip to Florida to see Atlantis launched and so was surprised and pleased to hear this show. There are only eight Shuttle launches left though, so if you want to see one, best get to it. After that, if you want to see a manned launch you’ll need to go to Khazakstan.
The future of NASA might make an interesting topic for a show down the road. The retirement of the Shuttle was inevitable after the Columbia accident. The Bush administration put together a follow on plan that takes us back to the Apollo era instead of leveraging shuttle technology and lessons learned. The result is a way less capable system which would not be able to do the kind of things that Atlantis is doing right now at Hubble. There is debate within NASA on the current plan, (see Popular Science article of a few months back), and the current administration has a commission reviewing that plan. As things develop it might make an intersting story.
MikeH
Posted by Mike Hughes, on May 22nd, 2009 at 9:11 am UTC