NASA's
space shuttle Atlantis moved out to its Florida launch pad Thursday to prepare
for one last flight to the Hubble Space Telescope next month after weather concerns
related to Tropical Storm Hanna eased at the seaside spaceport.
Rolling
slow and steady atop an Apollo-era carrier vehicle, Atlantis headed for
its Pad 39A launch site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Fla.,
following several days of delay due to Hanna. But by early this morning, the
storm's predicted path carried it far enough off shore to allow the shuttle's
move.
"It's going
very well," NASA spokesperson Candrea Thomas told SPACE.com from the
spaceport.
NASA
officials delayed
Atlantis' move this week to avoid the possibility of high winds and rain
from Tropical Storm Hanna. But while that storm is expected to have little
impact on the Atlantis' launch preparations, NASA is tracking two other storms
currently making their way east across the Atlantic Ocean.
Thomas said
KSC officials are watching the development of Hurricane Ike and, farther out,
Tropical Storm Josephine to understand what impacts both storms might have if
they stray too close to the coastal spaceport.
"What we
are doing is watching it extremely closely to find out where it's going to go,"
Thomas said of the closer Hurricane Ike, a Category 4 storm currently about 525
miles (845 km) northeast of the Leeward Islands. "We'll just watch Ike and
Josephine and see what happens."
Atlantis is
currently slated to launch toward Hubble on Oct. 8 carrying seven astronauts on
an 11-day mission to overhaul
the orbital observatory for the fifth and final time. Commanded by veteran
spaceflyer Scott Altman, Atlantis astronauts plan to stage five back-to-back
spacewalks to replace Hubble's batteries, gyroscopes and thermal shielding,
install new cameras, upgrade the telescope's guidance system, attach docking
equipment and make unprecedented repairs.
NASA initially
cancelled the mission due to safety concerns after the tragic 2003 loss of the
shuttle Columbia and its astronaut crew, but later reinstated it following
dissent from scientists and the public, as well as the development of heat shield
inspection and repair tools.
The space
agency also plans to have a second space shuttle — the Endeavour orbiter —
ready to serve
as a rescue ship in case Atlantis suffered critical damage. Unlike recent
shuttle missions, Atlantis will not be able to ferry its crew to the
International Space Station to await rescue in an emergency because Hubble
orbits the Earth at a higher altitude and different inclination than the station.
Instead, Atlantis
astronauts will carry supplies for an extra 25 days to allow time for Endeavour
and a four-person rescue crew to launch and rendezvous with their spacecraft,
Altman has said. Atlantis' crew would then transfer to Endeavour during a
series of spacewalks, but the actual likelihood such a rescue would ever be
required is very low, he added.
Atlantis' STS-125
mission to Hubble will mark the fourth of up to five space shuttle missions
planned for 2008.
Despite
weather delays, shuttle workers still have about four days of padding to their
current schedule to ready Atlantis for its planned Oct. 8 launch, Thomas said.
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