Jonathan Storm: Close-up look at 'Hubble's Amazing Rescue" http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20091013_Jonathan_Storm__Close-u p_look_at__Hubble_s_Amazing_Rescue_quot_.html
Inquirer Television Critic The science show Nova tonight has "Hubble's Amazing Rescue," at 8 on WHYY TV12. The title doesn't lie. You're unscrewing the cover to put a new bulb in a light fixture. Oooops. Now where did that darn screw go? There are 117 screws in one of the electronic circuit boards of the Hubble Space Telescope. Drop them in outer space, and those little metal bits would just float around, maybe into the telescope itself where they could rip the fine-tuned instruments apart. And the guy who has to remove them is wearing five-pound gloves. But first, astronaut Mike Massimino has to get this handrail out of the way, and it has a stripped bolt, and it's going nowhere. "I thought it was a nightmare," he told TV critics at their summer gathering in Los Angeles. "I remember transmitting around the payload bay thinking . . . 'I'm going to go down in the history books as, we would know if there is life on other planets, but Mike screwed up on the mission, and now we won't ever know." Eventually, he just yanked it off - with all their technical specs, the folks on the ground knew it would take precisely 60 pounds of torque - and it didn't spring back and put a hole in his space suit, and it didn't smash his helmet, and he didn't boil to death in the vacuum of space. You may recall that in 2004, then NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe eliminated space shuttle missions to repair the Hubble, saying that after the Columbia and Challenger disasters, in which 14 people died, they were simply too dangerous. The telescope, however, was designed for periodic repairs by people. NASA estimates the one documented in tonight's Nova, completed in May, should give the 19-year-old girl at least five more years of service. Physicist/astronomer John M. Grunsfeld, lead spacewalker on the other team that fixes the telescope on tonight's show, was finishing his tenure as NASA chief scientist when O'Keefe made his decision. He and Frank Cepollina, project manager for Hubble servicing at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, immediately lobbied to revive the program. "We were thrilled to put the shuttle mission back on," Grunsfeld said Friday on the phone from Houston, where he had just returned after a star-viewing party with President Obama on the White House lawn. "Now we have essentially a brand new telescope. The mission was a validation of this model for Hubble, designed to take complete advantage of the shuttle's capabilities." Tonight's show takes full advantage of television's capabilities. Filmmaker Rushmore DeNooyer spent two years with the seven-person crew as it trained for the mission. His footage is fascinating, as the spacewalkers practice for hours a day in a huge pool called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. You need weightlessness to maneuver in a 300-pound space suit that is impossible to manipulate in Earth's gravity. But it's the film taken by the astronauts 350 miles above Earth that provides the real excitement, as suspense music fitting for CSI: Miami plays in the background. Nova has always been about people and emotions, and it makes science so much more accessible. This one focuses on the mission, which made the telescope 10 to 70 times more powerful, not on the head-scratching wonders Hubble has uncovered. "Over the summer," Grunsfeld said, the new camera he installed "has demonstrated so much more sensitivity and high resolution that it has found half a dozen of the farthest galaxies in the universe, very close to its origin, 12.9 billion years old, within 700 million of the Big Bang. "And that's just a warm-up." You don't need to be some hot-shot military pilot to be an astronaut anymore, though it might help to understand the science. "Essentially, you send in a resume and an application," Grunsfeld said. "It's Government Standard Form 171. It's surprising, you know. There's a blank that says 'desired occupation,' and you write 'astronaut.' " The telescope itself and the intelligence and courage of the people who service it are testimony to the human spirit and the intense curiosity of humans to try to understand their universe. There are lots of those amazing deep-space shots that, to the untrained eye, don't look a whole lot different from the in-the-body miniature stuff you see on CSI. The most impressive celestial body, however, is the Earth, a huge blue-and-white curve in the background as the astronauts work. "Even though I've seen the pictures before," Grunsfeld said, "every mission is incredibly moving, this beautiful planet and its incredibly thin atmosphere. I never tire of seeing Planet Earth. . .. "When folks view the Earth from space, they can't help but think about some of the shortsighted decisions that are made there. It is our own space shuttle." *********************************** * POST TO MEDIANEWS@ETSKYWARN.NET * *********************************** Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
