_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [114]
But more than COSTAR was necessary to bring Hubble back to pristine performance. New forty-foot solar panels would replace those that shook when the ship passed between day and night, through temperature changes of 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Two magnetometers that had lost their precision attitude control would be removed to make way for new ones. A series of critical gyroscopes that pointed Hubble on command had either failed or were failing; new gyros would be installed. COSTAR would be eased by the spacewalkers into its housing. A new computer would be added to Hubble to eliminate “electronic memory lapses” and increase the space telescope’s reliability. And finally, the spacewalkers would repair flawed relays in the spectrograph that scanned the radiations of the universe.
Space Shuttle Endeavour departed Earth at 4:27 A.M. Eastern time on December 2, 1993, with astronauts and fifteen thousand pounds of precious tools, equipment, and supplies. No sooner than Endeavour had settled into orbit with its veteran crew, I was in the air headed for Mission Control in Houston. The Hubble repair mission had captured the public’s imagination like no space mission since the days of Apollo moon landings, and Tom Brokaw, along with master producers Phil Griffin and Jeff Gralnick, wanted my experience reporting Hubble’s repair on the NBC Nightly News.
The centuries-old technology that built Christopher Columbus’s three sailing ships passes the twentieth-century Space Shuttle Endeavour, awaiting liftoff on its launch pad. The replicas of the Santa Maria, Nina, and Pinta were part of the Spain ’92 Foundation tour of American ports to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. (NASA)
When Endeavour reached Hubble’s orbit, the astronauts found and seized the observatory with the Shuttle’s robotic arm as planned, and then the spacewalkers, equipped with pressure suits and working in pairs, went through an astonishing week of giving the crippled telescope new life and sparkling accuracy.
Floating a constant 375 miles above a curving horizon, looking like living snowmen, the spacewalkers performed weightless ballets to make their repairs. It was a feat unparalleled in history, surgeons of the new age operating beneath a star-filled theater. There had not been so much attention paid by billions of people since astronauts walked on the moon. With producer Phil Griffin running interference for us in New York, Tom Brokaw’s viewers, as well as those of NBC’s early-morning Today Show, were looking over the spacewalkers’ shoulders. Live television cameras followed their every move. We from NBC were sleeping in two shifts. The crew and I were up at 4:00 A.M. to take care of Today and then back to bed, then up again at 2:00 P.M. to take care of Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News. A couple of times we came close to meeting ourselves coming when we were going.
Floating on the end of the shuttle Endeavour’s robotic arm at the top of the mammoth Hubble space telescope, spacewalkers Story Musgrave and Jeffrey Hoffman are seen above the west coast of Australia. (NASA).
For the spacewalkers, performing microsurgery on Hubble’s systems, as well as moving bulky and cumbersome equipment into the right slot at the right speed and with perfect aim, was like trying to weave a frond basket wearing thick mittens. The astronauts performed eleven major repairs while Hubble managers on the ground sweated out every move. One misstep could wreck the mission and damage Hubble beyond repair. Yet, from changing fuses to sliding the refrigerator-sized COSTAR into the telescope’s bowels with less than an inch of room to spare, they pulled it off, against terrible odds, with nonstop perfection.
Finally the nerve-racking mission was nearing its end. The old solar panels