Atlantis spacewalkers Mike Massimino and Mike Good are back inside shuttle Atlantis and repressurizing its airlock, officially ending at 5:47 p.m. a challenging but apparently successful effort to revive one of the Hubble Space Telescope's key science instruments.
The mission's fourth of five spacewalks lasted lasted even longer than their nearly eight-hour effort Friday, which was then the eighth longest spacewalk ever.
Today's excursion totaled eight hours and two minutes, ranking it No. 6 all time.
Massimino and Good installed a new power supply card into the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, which had shut down in 2004.
As the pair was cleaning up and stowing its tools, Massimino reported seeing a hole in the palm of his glove with white material showing through. But mission managers said his suit was maintaining proper pressure and did not force him to rush back to the airlock.
Telescope operators reported that the spectrograph's new power supply is working. But tests of its three science channels were cut short when the instrument "safed" itself because of a temperature problem.
They believe the instrument is OK, and plan to restart the tests.
One more spacewalk remains on Monday, and mission managers are analyzing whether to change its timeline to include work that couldn't be finished today.
That was the installation of a protective thermal blanket on one of Hubble's equipment bays.
Another blanket was already scheduled to be installed Monday, in addition to higher priority batteries and navigation sensors.
Mission specialists John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel will team up for the third time, and likely become the last humans to lay hands on Hubble.
1 comment:
Hey, it's in their contract, space creatures always get the last touch.
Post a Comment