NASA has delayed the last shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope until early 2009 in
order to repair a broken device that is blocking the orbital observatory from
sending its iconic images of the cosmos back to Earth, agency officials said
late Monday.
Seven
astronauts were training to launch toward Hubble aboard the shuttle Atlantis on
Oct. 14 on mission to extend the space telescope's life through at least 2013,
but the unexpected
failure of a vital data relay system on Saturday will add months of delay
to their spaceflight.
"I think it's
very obvious that Oct. 14 is off the table," NASA's space shuttle program manager
John Shannon told reporters.
NASA announced
Monday that a device known as the Side A Science Data Formatter failed,
apparently for good, late Saturday, leaving the otherwise healthy Hubble with
no means of relaying data and observations to scientists back on Earth. The electronics
box failed after 18 years in service since Hubble launched in April 1990.
There is a
backup for the unit, Side B, and flight controllers on Earth are working to
make the complicated switch to revive Hubble's science relay capabilities. But
the move will leave the telescope without the redundancy to withstand another
failure should one occur, making a repair for the Side A string vital, mission
managers said.
"We do not
really understand the precise location of the failure inside of the Science
Data Formatter," said Preston Burch, NASA's Hubble program manager at the
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "And we won't until we bring it
down to the ground."
Spare in
hand
NASA does
have a spare unit at Goddard, but will have to put it through a series of tests
to ensure it is in good health.
Burch said
that there is high confidence that the spare box, which is relatively brand new
despite being 18 years old, is viable for the Hubble repair. But the tests
required to prove its spaceworthiness will take months.
"I think we'd
be hard-pressed to be ready any earlier than, say, January," Burch said, adding
that even mid-January could be a bit of a stretch. "It's looking more like a mid-February
timeframe is the right time for us."
Replacing
the 136-pound (62-kg) data formatter box should be relatively straightforward for
Atlantis's crew, requiring about two hours during one of the mission's five
back-to-back spacewalks to perform, Burch said. One cable connector and 10
bolts need to be freed to remove the box from its mount, he added.
Commanded
by veteran spaceflyer Scott Altman, Atlantis astronauts plan to install a new
camera, replace gyroscopes and batteries, upgrade Hubble's guidance equipment
and add a docking ring during their 11-day mission. Tricky repairs to
instruments never designed to be fixed in space are also on tap. The mission
will mark NASA's fifth and final
shuttle flight to Hubble.
The
astronauts were in the middle of an intense simulation on Monday when news of
the delay broke, Shannon said.
NASA has
not formally set a new launch target, though the agency has called off a
planned flight readiness review that would have done so at the end of this
week. In the off chance that the spare data formatter fails to pass muster,
Atlantis could be primed to launch toward Hubble as early as late November.
Shannon
said that by the end of next week, shuttle mission managers should have a
better sense of what Atlantis' launch target will be.
A lucky
failure
For every
month NASA delays Atlantis' flight to Hubble, it adds an extra $10 million to
the space telescope program's cost. But, mission managers said, the cost could
have been much higher.
"Think
about if this failure had occurred two weeks after the servicing mission. We'd
just put to brand new instruments in and thought we'd extended the life from
five to 10 years and this thing failed after the
last shuttle mission to Hubble," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator
for science missions. "We could have lost the mission in six, 12, 18 months.
"So in some
sense, if this had to happen it couldn't have happened at a better time," he
added.
Atlantis'
planned October flight was slated to mark NASA's fourth of up to five shuttle
missions planned for this year. The mission was initially slated to launch in
early October, but slipped several days due to a series of setbacks caused by
Hurricane Ike and payload delivery issues.
The agency
launched three shuttle flights earlier this year to continue construction of
the International Space Station, with the Endeavour orbiter slated to continue that
work with a planned Nov. 16 liftoff. Shannon said that if Atlantis' mission
slips into 2009 for sure, NASA will prepare Endeavour for its own
STS-126 mission to deliver new life support and other equipment that will
allow the station to double its current three-astronaut crew size.
Meanwhile,
NASA engineers at Goddard and their shuttle mission counterparts will work together
to determine the best repair plan for Hubble. It was a similar effort, mission
managers said, that allowed astronauts to fix Hubble's blurry vision in space
after a mirror defect nearly doomed the space telescope in the early 1990s.
"Hubble has
a habit of coming back from adversity," said Weiler, adding that the Hubble and
space shuttle team "works miracles." "I'm not too concerned about this, we'll
find a way to get this fixed. Luckily, we have a spare."
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