[SWOOSHING SOUND EFFECTS]
[INTENSE MUSIC]
>>WEISS: It’s our last shot. It’s the fifth and final time.
It’s our last shot to extend Hubble’s life and bring it to
the apex of it’s scientific capability. >>GRUNSFELD: And
we just have lots of things we want to repair on Hubble, and
upgrade on Hubble and not a lot of time to do it. >>WEISS: And
we are going to take up everything we can take up, and
on this flight it’s about twenty-three thousand pounds of
hardware. >>LECKRONE: This is going to be a very exciting,
complicated and challenging mission. We have seven brave
astronauts who’ve made a conscious decision to risk their
lives in order to continue the advancement of science that
Hubble has begun. They’re going to buy another five, perhaps ten
more years of lifetime for this great telescope.
>> BURCH: We’ve got a full plate of things to do. We’ve got major
science upgrades that we are going to do.
So, we have two new science instruments
that we are going to install. >>GRUNSFELD: We’re
going to put in the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. And this
is, you know, the fanciest spectrograph that has ever been
put into Hubble. >>LECKRONE: COS plus Hubble together, will
be able to observe deeper across the universe than any other
instrument of this kind has ever done before. >>WEISS: We’re
going to install the Wide Field Camera 3, Hubble’s new imager.
>>CHEUNG: Wide Field Camera 3’s discovery factor is about ten
times better than the current instruments that we have on
Hubble. One of the beautiful things about our new camera the
Wide Field Camera 3 is, it will be capable of looking further
out across the universe and farther back in time, and closer
to the big bang than any other camera we’ve ever had on Hubble
before. >>WEISS: We’re also going to attempt two repairs of
the two failed instruments on board Hubble: the Advanced
Camera for Surveys and STIS. >>LECKRONE: ACS was inserted on
Hubble in 2002. Before it died, it was the most heavily used
instrument on Hubble. And, STIS was our first black hole hunter
and it went on to do the first detection and chemical analysis
of the atmosphere of a planet around another star. We want to
keep on doing that kind of work when STIS comes back on line.
>>BURCH: This will be the first time that we’ve ever done an
in-situ repair of science instruments. So this will be a
big challenge. >>MASSIMINO: In fact there is a hundred and ten
of these very small screws that we need to remove from the
instrument in order to gain access to the board we need to
replace. And in space, things float and debris is a real
issue. >>LECKRONE: If we’re successful in repairing these
two science instruments that have failed, it will be a real
triumph for NASA engineering and will point the way toward our
ability in the future to repair instruments in space. We want
Hubble to last a while longer as a spacecraft and since this will
be our last opportunity to go service it we’re going to do
things like change out all the gyroscopes that help Hubble
point. We’re going to put in a new fine guidance sensor. I say
a "new" fine guidance sensor; in fact it’s a refurbished fine
guidance sensor. It’s one that’s been on Hubble before and been
brought back to Earth, refurbished it so it’s a "used"
fine guidance sensor but a, "first class." We’re going to
change out our batteries. We’ve never put in new batteries since
Hubble was launched. >>BURCH: We have some insulation repair
work that needs to be done. >>GREGORY: We’re going to
install a New Outer Blanket Layer called a NOBL. Which is a
solid. It’s a blanket anymore; it’s a solid sheet that will go
over the blanket. And, we’ll also be installing a soft
capture mechanism on the aft bulkhead of Hubble that will
help facilitate a future mission to Hubble primarily for the
purpose of deorbiting it at the end of it’s useful life.
>>LECKRONE: The two repaired scientific instruments working
in tandem with the two new instruments that we are going to
put on board Hubble in this mission will enable scientists
to tackle some of the most profound issues facing modern
science, not just astronomy but physics today. This in my mind
means that when the astronauts leave Hubble after Servicing
Mission 4, it will be at the absolute apex of its
capabilities. It will be better than it’s ever been before.
[INTENSE MUSIC]