When we see the beautiful pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, we forget the enormous work that's involved in keeping the facility running. It's not just the initial construction and launch, but the Hubble Space Telescope approaching three decades in operation has been periodically upgraded by servicing missions that rejuvenate its instruments, changes solar panels and batteries, and give it new life. I'm Kathy Thornton, I was a mission specialist on the first service mission of Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. It's amazing to me when I was flying in space orbiting, that I can look back at the earth and you don't see a lot of evidence that we're here. But yet, those little tiny beings down on earth that I can't see were smart enough to get me there. Then I'm going to pull it a little bit and we'll just communicate. We were not the most significant part. We might have been the most visible. But the real heroes of the service missions are the people who figured out how to do it, the people who came up with the fixes. I'll probably use the existing in my life and come up with some type of cover that we will put on it and tape it in place. My name is Russ Werneth. Have been involved with all five of the Hubble servicing missions. Back in 1993 when we did our first servicing mission, I was involved in designing all the tools that we use. On that mission we did five spacewalks, I did the second and the fourth one. On my spacewalks, we put in a new solar rays and we installed the Costar which included the corrective optics for all the axial instruments in the bottom part of the telescope. We think a lot about the engineering and the technology that goes into Hubble and makes it work, and the innovation and design that went into the fixes for the Hubble and every new instrument that goes up in the Hubble, and those are pretty amazing. But the purpose of a Hubble is science. The purpose of Hubble is to help us learn about where we came from. About what happened before us in this universe. Servicing the Hubble one more time with the Shuttle is well-worth the risks to the crew and to the vehicle and to the Hubble itself. Every time we touch it, we plan to make it better but you can always make it worse, and so there are some risks to the telescope as well. When we plan for servicing mission with the astronauts, we always ask ourselves the questions of what if. What if this too were to fail? What if this procedure wouldn't work? Therefore we do all the training that's necessary. We have contingency tools. We have backup tools. We have backup procedures. There was a handrail that had to be removed, and as much as we practiced on the ground with tools and procedures, that handrail couldn't be removed because of one of the bolts. As Mike Massimino was working real time with his EVA his spacewalk, we were working on the ground to figure out how we could solve that problem. We went through several levels of contingency, and then ultimately, it came down to just using brute force on that handrail to get that bolt to break. We've essentially been able to leave a new telescope every time we finish up a servicing mission. I have a picture on my wall of one of the first Hubble deep field photos, where Hubble was pointed at a place in the sky where there wasn't anything. But imagine that you could look through a straw or a pinhole and find a place in the sky where there's absolutely nothing and know that there are millions of galaxies in that little pinhole that you're looking at. I think, more than anything else, Hubble is an icon; of science, of exploration, and of the things that we as humans can do. The Hubble Space Telescope still astronomy's flagship mission, has been rejuvenated by servicing missions over the years; that have given it new cutting edge capabilities. This telescope which wouldn't crack the top 50 of the world's largest telescopes is still fully competitive to the biggest telescopes on earth because of its wonderful instrumentation.
