Training for the final Hubble Service Mission-Part II
When exposing the new components and astronauts for the final Hubble mission, the thermal vacuum is called “the granddaddy of them all” as this is the testing chamber which exposes the payloads to the space conditions en route to the Hubble telescope—removing all the but the tiniest bit of air and able to chill a payload, chosen to go to the Hubble, down to -310 F. degrees, or heat it to 302 F. degrees, consisting of a 600-degree range.
Massive mechanical vacuum pumps, considered to be larger versions of the vacuum cleaners we use at home, are used to remove the air down to a billionth of Earth’s normal atmospheric pressure. The chamber uses cryopumps to ensure the hard vacuum of space is simulated in the test chamber, using liquid nitrogen to condense all the remaining gases out of the chamber once the mechanical pumps have completed their work.
Built at Goddard, the Wide Field Camera 3 will soon replace the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which was originally installed on the Hubble telescope during the first 1993 servicing mission. Testing the new camera in the vacuum chamber, engineers sent commands to those which it will receive while in orbit to see its response manner—testing its temperature, vacuum and commands that are part of the launch to the Hubble on August 28, 2008.
Once the testing is over, and the chamber processes are completed, the payload will go to the Space Systems Development Facility at Goddard where they will be final tested and inspected prior to launching in the world’s largest Class-10,000 clean room. And last but not least, the astronauts trained at the center September 10-14, 2007 for hands on training, along with daily briefings for the up-coming service mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS) science instrument had entered “safe mode” on September 1, 2007, at 10:59 p.m. EDT. The reason for this is when a NICMOS routine was unsuccessful when it failed to perform a routine read of internal engineering status, thereby shutting itself down. On September 4, it was successfully restored to operational readiness, with science observations using NICMOS resuming on September 9th.
But overall everything is worth it, with the Hubble ever-ending famous for its views of the Universe, beginning within our own Universe onto the galaxies which have been formed after the Big Bank, 13.7 billion years ago, or vice-versa. Named after the astronomer, Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953), the Hubble was launched in 1990.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 3:16 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
