Astronauts trying to bring device back from dead

HOUSTON – Atlantis’ astronauts suited up yesterday for their second in-orbit repair of a dead science instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope in as many days.

This time, Michael Massimino and Michael Good were going to venture out of space shuttle Atlantis to try to fix a long-dead spectrograph. The day before, two other spacewalkers fixed a camera.
As spacewalk preparations were under way yesterday morning, Mission Control notified the astronauts that testing had confirmed that two of the science channels on the repaired camera were working again. A third was not.
But the wide-field channel that was resuscitated is ‘the real workhorse’ and carries 95 per cent of the science output, Mission Control noted.
‘Fantastic! Power is restored,’ said astronaut John Grunsfeld, the chief Hubble handyman who made the camera repairs.
Nasa officials hoped yesterday’s spacewalk would be just as successful.
Once outdoors, Massimino will have to remove 117 screws from the failed spectrograph, and he can’t let any float away.
It’s a repair job that was not part of the scientific instrument’s design, so Nasa had to make dozens of special tools.
The light-separating device makes a fingerprint of cosmic objects. It is good for finding black holes and examining the atmosphere of planets outside our solar system.
This will be the fourth spacewalk for the Atlantis astronauts, leaving just one more before it’s time to set the better-than-ever Hubble free. No further repair missions are planned for the 19-year-old observatory, which Nasa expects to keep operating for another five to 10 years.
– Nampa-AP