The space
shuttle Atlantis moved out to its seaside launch pad in Florida early Tuesday
to prepare for NASA's long-delayed final flight to the iconic Hubble Space
Telescope.
Moving
slowly atop an Apollo-era carrier vehicle, Atlantis began the 3.4-mile (5.4-km)
trip to Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 3:54 a.m. EDT (0754 GMT) and reached
the launch site about seven hours later.
With
Atlantis at the launch pad, NASA will once more prepare the spacecraft for a
May 12 launch to the Hubble Space Telescope. Five back-to-back spacewalks are
planned during the 11-day mission to upgrade
the orbital observatory and extend its life through at least 2013.
The mission
has been delayed
since last fall, when a data handling unit aboard Hubble unexpectedly
failed just weeks before Atlantis was due to launch toward the space
observatory.
NASA
engineers revived
Hubble from the failure and began preparing a spare to launch aboard
Atlantis and be added its overhaul mission.
The spare
data handling unit arrived at the Kennedy Space Center on Monday, NASA
spokesperson Allard Beutel told SPACE.com from the Cape Canaveral, Fla.,
spaceport.
Commanded
by veteran spaceflyer Scott Altman, Atlantis's STS-125
mission to Hubble will send seven astronauts on the fifth and final service
call to the orbiting laboratory.
The
astronauts are expected to add a new camera, replace gyroscopes and batteries, as
well attempt to repair equipment that was never designed to be fixed in space.
They also plan to attach a docking ring to the telescope so a robotic vehicle
could visit it in the future.
Tile
repaired
Beutel told
SPACE.com that aside from a minor ding to one of the heat-resistant tiles on Atlantis that required repair, the shuttle's preparations for launch
have gone smoothly.
Last week,
a shuttle worker accidentally dropped a torque wrench socket while tightening
bolts on the bipod strut that connects the shuttle's nose with its 15-story
external fuel tank. The socket bounced off a beam and dinged a tile near the
fuel inlets on the belly of Atlantis.
"It was something
that was very repairable," Beutel said. Engineers filed the small ding with heat-resistant putty and molded it to fit
the shuttle's aerodynamic lines, he added.
Efforts to
prepare a second shuttle, the Endeavour orbiter, to serve as a rescue ship for
the Atlantis astronauts are also going well, Beutel said.
Because
Hubble orbits the Earth higher and in a different inclination than the
International Space Station, Atlantis would not be able to ferry its crew to
the orbiting laboratory to seek refuge should the shuttle suffer critical damage.
Instead, NASA is preparing Endeavour and a skeleton crew to be ready to lift
off from a second launch pad to retrieve the Atlantis astronauts if needed.
Beutel said
that Endeavour is on track to leave its hangar and move into NASA's cavernous
Vehicle Assembly Building on April 10. The shuttle is then expected head out to
the seaside Pad 39B launch site on April 17.
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