The cradle used to hold Hubble in the shuttle’s cargo bay during the
last servicing mission now resides in a clean room at Goddard Space
Flight Center. Richard Talcott photo
Over the past 2 decades at
Astronomy magazine, I’ve had the pleasure to report on the Hubble Space Telescope and its findings in dozens of feature articles and news stories. So imagine my thrill when I was invited to see some of the final equipment used to service Hubble this past May. The space gear resides at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland, just a short hop north on the Metro from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Washington, D.C.
Goddard’s Frank Reddy was my tour guide yesterday. We saw lots of testing facilities and clean rooms, where workers don “bunny suits” to work on hardware destined for space. We even got to see workers prepare to lift a shroud into the thermal-vacuum chamber, where many of the components for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be tested.
But the highlight for me was seeing the cradle that held Hubble in the shuttle’s cargo bay during the last servicing mission. It came back to Earth with the astronauts, as did lots of smaller pieces of equipment. Some of these appeared in sealed bags on tables scattered around the same clean room as the cradle.
In some ways, it left me nostalgic to see this hardware and realize that we’ll never service Hubble again. But seeing the latest science produced by the refurbished observatory at the AAS meeting quickly cured me of any sadness. And with the work going on at Goddard and elsewhere to ready JWST for launch in 2014, I’m sure the science will keep on flowing for another decade at least.
More updates from 215th AAS meeting: