NASA MANAGERS DELAY HUBBLE SERVICING MISSION

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Oct. 30, 2008

Allard Beutel
Kennedy Space Center 
321-867-2468
allard.beutel@nasa.gov

Don Savage/J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0183
donald.l.savage@nasa.gov

Katherine Trinidad
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-3749
katherine.trinidad-1@nasa.gov

MEDIA ADVISORY: 08-280

NASA MANAGERS DELAY HUBBLE SERVICING MISSION

WASHINGTON -- NASA managers have announced that they will not meet a 
February 2009 launch date for the fifth and final shuttle mission to 
the Hubble Space Telescope. The decision comes after engineers 
completed assessments of the work needed to get a second data 
handling unit for the telescope ready to fly. The unit will replace 
one that failed on Hubble in late September, causing the agency to 
postpone the servicing mission, which had been targeted for Oct. 14. 

"We now have done enough analysis of all the things that need to 
happen with the flight spare unit to know that we cannot be ready for 
a February launch," said NASA's Astrophysics Division Director Jon 
Morse at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The February date was an 
initial estimate, assuming minimal hardware preparations and test 
durations that are no longer viewed as realistic. We've communicated 
our assessment to the Space Shuttle Program so it can adjust 
near-term plans. We will work closely with the Shuttle Program to 
develop details for a new launch opportunity." 

"Getting ourselves in a position to be ready to launch the Hubble 
mission will involve many steps, and a significant one took place 
earlier today," said Hubble Program Manager Preston Burch at NASA's 
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We held a flight 
certification peer review meeting where every aspect for doing this 
effort -- the inspections needed, all the tests to be conducted, the 
certification process and the final flight preparations -- was 
examined. The conclusion was that we indeed have a very good plan in 
place." 

The Hubble flight spare, known as the Science Instrument Command and 
Data Handling system, has been at Goddard since it was originally 
delivered as a back-up system in 1991. The unit currently is 
undergoing testing and examination to identify and correct any 
problems. That work will continue until mid-December. 

The unit will then undergo environmental assessments that include 
electro-magnetic interference checks, vibration tests, and extended 
time in a thermal vacuum chamber. Environmental testing is 
anticipated to run from mid-December to early March 2009. Final 
testing will be conducted on the unit, and delivery to NASA's Kennedy 
Space Center in Florida is expected in early April. 

"The equipment we are dealing with has a flight-proven design," said 
Burch." The original unit on Hubble ran for more than 18 years. We 
have a lot of spare parts if we encounter problems, and we have most 
of the same test equipment that was used with the original unit. We 
also have a lot of experience on our Hubble electrical replica, which 
uses the engineering model data handling unit." 

The vast majority of the flight hardware, tools and support equipment 
that will be used during the mission will be stored at Kennedy. A 
small amount of new work such as re-lubricating the latches on the 
Soft Capture Mechanism and testing the motors on the Flight Support 
System will be conducted. The Wide Field Camera 3 will remain in its 
carrier. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is in a special 
double-layered purge system in its shipping container to help support 
its environmental needs. The new batteries to be installed during the 
mission are in cold storage at Goddard and will be returned to 
Kennedy in 2009. 

In the meantime, science observations on Hubble that had been 
suspended continue to move toward standard operations. The current 
primary camera on the telescope, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, 
was brought back online. On Wednesday, calibration images with the 
Advanced Camera for Surveys' Solar Blind Channel were completed. 
Regular science observations resumed Thursday, and the first science 
image from the camera was released. 

For more information about Hubble, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble  

For more information about the Space Shuttle Program, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle 

	
-end-



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