Photo credit: NASA
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope celebrates the 30th anniversary of its Servicing Mission 1, which began on Dec. 2, 1993, when the space shuttle Endeavour launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This telescope was specially designed to be serviced in space with modular components that astronauts can simply slide in and replace, without having to worry about complex repairs.
What components did the astronauts replace on Hubble? Its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), along with other critical upgrades. The most interesting component was probably COSTAR, a refrigerator-sized device boasting a constellation of mirrors, some merely coin-sized, intended to correct and redirect light to the telescope’s other cameras as well as spectrographs. When all was said and done, astronauts performed five extravehicular activities, totaling over 35 hours.
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The sense that you got was everybody was looking at the servicing and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope as the mission that could prove NASA’s worth … There was this overarching focus and pressure on the success of this mission,” said Richard Covey, Servicing Mission 1 Astronaut.
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