Hubble more powerful than ever since repairs

By Tariq Malik

updated 11:17 a.m. ET May 27, 2009

The Hubble Space Telescope appears better than new as NASA puts the 19-year-old observatory through a battery of tests after its final facelift by an astronaut repair crew.

Ed Weiler, NASA's science missions chief, said Hubble is in the midst of meticulous systems and calibration checks following the successful upgrades and repairs by Atlantis shuttle astronauts.

"All of those have gone beautifully," Weiler told reporters after Atlantis' smooth California landing on Sunday.  "Everything is going well, as far as I can tell."

The calibrations and electronics tests should run their course by the end of summer, with a new and improved Hubble once more ready for science observations in late August, Weiler said.

Atlantis and its crew of seven astronauts touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California Sunday morning. The astronauts returned triumphant after a 13-day Hubble service call.

"Now, and only now, can we declare this mission completely a success," said Weiler, who served as Hubble's chief scientist between 1979 and 1998. "The astronauts are safely on the ground."

Commanded by veteran spaceflyer Scott Altman, the Atlantis astronauts launched toward Hubble on May 11 and performed a five-spacewalk marathon that left the iconic space observatory more powerful than ever before.

A whole new telescope
Atlantis' mission was NASA's fifth and last-ever shuttle flight to overhaul Hubble. NASA plans to retire its three aging space shuttles fleet next year and their replacement, the capsule-based Orion, is designed to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and, ultimately, the moon.

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During their five back-to-back spacewalks, Atlantis astronauts installed two new instruments in Hubble — a powerful wide-field camera and a super-sensitive spectrograph.

They swapped out old gyroscopes and batteries with new ones, performed two intricate repairs to revive two instruments — Hubble's main Advanced Camera for Surveys and a versatile imaging spectrograph — that were never designed to be fixed in space.

The enhancements, he added, should be the focus, and not the fact humans will never visit the space telescope again.

"We just repaired the Hubble Space Telescope," an emphatic Weiler said. "We've got a whole new telescope. We've got four new instruments. Two of them dead, now alive.

"These are truly the best of times," Weiler said. "Not the worst of times."

The upgrades by the Atlantis crew should extend the space telescope's life through at least 2014 if not longer, which would overlap with NASA's next great observatory — the infrared-scanning James Webb Space Telescope slated to launch in 2013.

Atlantis spacewalkers also attached a docking ring to Hubble so that, sometime after 2020, a robotic spacecraft can latch onto the telescope and discard it in the Pacific Ocean at its mission's end.

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