Expected to blast clear of its Kennedy Space Center launch pad at around 18:00 GMT tonight (14:00 EDT), the space shuttle Atlantis and her crew are on target to begin an 11-day mission to perform vital maintenance work on the long-serving Hubble Space Telescope.
This will be Atlantis in about three hours... weather allowing. Image: Jurvetson/Flickr.
American space administration NASA has confirmed it began fuelling Atlantis earlier today ahead of the launch, which, weather allowing, will mark the fifth and final time manned maintenance has been dispatched to the giant telescope since it took up orbit in 1990.
The last time NASA’s space shuttle fleet was required to deploy manned maintenance for Hubble was in 2003, when the doomed Columbia and her crew were lost during re-entry after the shuttle sustained critical damage during blast-off.
Today’s mission launch (STS 125) is of particular note because mission safety measures adopted by NASA since the loss of Columbia, which see the International Space Station used as a haven for any shuttle damaged at launch, will not apply to the Atlantis.
Specifically, the position of Hubble’s orbit will leave Atlantis stranded too far from the space station, which has left NASA with little option but to fully prepare a rescue shuttle on a separate pad at the Kennedy Space Center in the unlikely event that Atlantis is unable to safely perform a reentry.
Once Atlantis successfully reaches the aging telescope, the crew will embark on a total of five spacewalks, during which time they will install new camera devices, repair malfunctioning components and completely replace the orbiting platform’s array of old gyroscopes and batteries.
Given the recent media coverage focusing on manmade space junk falling to Earth from orbit, the team of astronauts will also attach a special docking ring to Hubble, which will enable its controlled removal once it reaches the end of its mission in 2014.
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