Hubble Repair Mission More Risky than You Would Ever Imagine

[n2doc]

If you think that the final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope is going to be boring, you haven't seen this video yet. Not only the astronauts will be risking their lives as usual at 366 miles above the Earth, but the sheer amount and the difficulty of the tasks—from repairing components to replacing them to installing new gadgets—makes the mission an almost-impossible one, with soundtrack to match. I never imagined this was going to be such an ambitious and daunting work.

First, there's the pressure the astronauts are going to be facing. In addition to the stress of the spacewalks and the manual work in a weightless environment, they know this is not only the final mission, but also a single shot to service the mighty telescope. If some of the tasks are not completed, there's no way to return back another time and fix whatever is broken. The mission crew knows that Hubble is a vital instrument to science—one that keeps expanding our knowledge of the Universe, helping to answer the most crucial question Humanity has ever faced: where the hell do we come from?—and that the astronauts are men and women of science. And they are going to be the ones responsible for giving science this amazing tool for ten more years.

Then there's the time constrain: just eleven days. As John Grunsfeld—one of the mission astronauts with Andrew Feustel, Gregory Johnson, Megan McCarthur, Michael Good, Scott Altman, and Michael Massimino—puts it: "We got a lot of things we want to repair in Hubble and upgrade in Hubble, and not a lot of time to do it." During that short time, this is all the things they have to do:

more:
http://gizmodo.com/5046276/hubble-repair-mission-more-risky-than-you-would-ever-imagine

[kurth_]

1. Awesome hardware

Great clips. Thanks!

[WhiteTara]

2. a Cosmic Origin Spectrograph

I love it.