The major goals of the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission have been met, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. employees couldn’t be prouder.
“We’re very pleased. It accomplished everything and more,” said Lisa Hardaway, a Ball engineer who is manager of one of the newly installed scientific instruments on the Hubble.
The space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to put the telescope back into orbit today and return to Earth on Friday.
All five of the rejuvenated telescope’s instruments were built by Boulder-based Ball.
Hardaway said that as “perfect” as the five repair spacewalks went, “it did get tense” when astronauts encountered a balky latch on an instrument scheduled for removal.
“It was a known risk, and we had contingency plans,” Hardaway said.
Four Ball engineers were stationed at mission control in Houston, and a dozen more were at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland ready to come up with solutions.
In the end, astronauts used a little torque to get the job done. Brute force also was called in to the successful repair of the black-hole-hunting Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.
Hardaway said one of three channels for the Advanced Camera for Surveys is “not quite working” after four circuit boards were replaced but that about 95 percent of the science will be possible.
The risky, challenging mission was “very amazing,” Hardaway said. “The comment in the control room was that the astronauts have set the bar very high. They made it look easy.”
Hardaway said the Ball engineers planned to celebrate by catching some sleep.
Then, another cosmic project beckons. Ball has the contract for building the massive mirror system for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2014.
Ann Schrader: 303-954-1967 or aschrader@denverpost.com
