Astronaut Mike Good rides on the robotic arm of the space shuttle Atlantis May 15. His space walk is the second of five scheduled walks needed to carry out the final repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. The crew aims during this space walk to install six new gyroscopes and three of the six new batteries on Hubble.
During a space walk May 14 that lasted 7 hours and 20 minutes, astronauts installed a new backup computer for Hubble. The original backup had to be put into use after the main computer failed last fall. Shuttle astronauts and spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel also removed the telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and replaced it with a new infrared wide-field camera, which should enable Hubble to take large-scale, detailed photos and see galaxies farther back in time.
The astronauts, aided by astronaut Megan McArthur operating the shuttle's robotic arm, also installed a soft capture mechanism, which will allow future vehicles to attach to the telescope. This mission is the last space shuttle visit to Hubble, but other space vehicles could someday make maintenance trips or even go up to retrieve parts of the telescope.— Ron Cowen
Credit: IMAGE: NASA TV
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