14 DAY TRIAL // The STS-125 mission is scheduled for lift-off on May 12th, NASA officials have announced, and the Atlantis space shuttle is already in place to complete the task. Early yesterday morning, the Apollo-era crawler vehicle was again used to transport a very important cargo from the KSC preparation building to the seaside Launch Pad 39A. This is the second time Atlantis is prepared for take-off, with the last attempt at fixing the Hubble Telescope having failed due to a malfunctioning piece of hardware aboard the orbit-based observatory.
Commanded by veteran astronaut Scott Altman, the STS-125 mission will perform the fifth and final overhaul of the iconic Hubble telescope, delivering two new instruments and fixing two others that have been long since nonoperational. A new data-handling unit will also be installed on the observatory, since the existing one failed last autumn, preventing the mission from taking off when it was first scheduled to. Also, during the 5 spacewalks that will be performed during the 11-day mission, the seven crew members aboard Atlantis will install a new docking platform on the telescope, Space reports.
This platform will be of paramount importance when it will be time for the instrument to be decommissioned and de-orbited. An unmanned craft will have to dock on the Hubble and then gently kick it off its orbit and force it into a descending path through the atmosphere. If it doesn't burn up completely on reentry, the remains of the world's most famous observatory will splatter into the ocean. Hopefully, some of them will be collected and displayed in museums.
Hubble is the telescope that has, perhaps, supplied the world with the most valuable astronomical data. Since it was first launched in 2000, the instrument has yielded some truly amazing views of other galaxies, solar systems and stars, as well as photos of thousands of other formations, including neutron stars, binary star systems, quasars, and so on.
This has also been one of the main reasons why four more missions have had the objective of repairing and upgrading the telescope in the past. However, after STS-125, there will be no more such flights, as NASA is moving on to other projects, with a much better range and accuracy.