After a two-day approach to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope, the space shuttle Atlantis has captured the probe and stowed it safely in its payload bay. Astronauts will begin the first of five full days of spacewalks on Thursday to refurbish the probe and extend its life until at least 2014 (Image: NASA)

After seven years of floating alone in space, the Hubble Space Telescope has found a temporary home aboard the space shuttle Atlantis. Hubble is now secured on a platform in the shuttle’s payload bay, where astronauts will work for five consecutive days to refurbish the telescope and extend its life until at least 2014.

From a perch high above western Australia, astronaut Megan McArthur used the shuttle’s 15-metre-long robotic arm to grab Hubble on Wednesday.

As the captured telescope came into view of astronauts in the shuttle, lead spacewalker John Grunsfeld, who has visited the telescope on two previous shuttle missions, sent the first dispatch on the condition of the telescope to mission control: “I’m just looking out the window here, and it’s an unbelievably beautiful sight. Amazingly, the exterior of Hubble, an old man of 19 years in space, still looks in fantastic shape.”


Delicate manoeuvres

It has been more than seven years since a shuttle visited Hubble, and this 11-day shuttle mission will be the last to service the iconic telescope. Over the course of five spacewalks, astronauts will install six new gyroscopes to help the telescope stabilise itself, six new batteries, two new science instruments and will repair two others (see Pimp my scope: Revamping Hubble).

To reach Hubble, shuttle commander Scott Altman manually piloted the craft from a seat in the rear of the flight deck overlooking the payload bay. Since Hubble could not actively communicate its position to the shuttle, mission specialist Michael Good measured the closing distance by aiming a hand-held laser range-finder through the shuttle windows.

Once the shuttle was within reach, astronauts used the shuttle’s robotic arm to grab the 11-tonne telescope Hubble and place it on a platform at the rear of the shuttle’s payload bay. Hubble is secured by three latches to the platform, on a ring that can be rotated 360 degrees to allow astronauts full access to all sides of the telescope.

Planning for the end

The first of the five spacewalks will begin on Thursday, when Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel will remove Hubble’s 15-year-old Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and install a $132 million, 400-kg (900-lb) replacement, called Wide Field Camera 3.

The astronauts will also replace a unit that relays commands and images to and from the telescope’s instruments. Hubble’s router, which has been flying since the probe was launched in 1994, experienced a glitch last year that incapacitated one of its two equivalent sides. The shuttle launch was postponed for six months in order to prepare a replacement.

On Thursday, astronauts will also install a new grapple fixture, which could be used by a future vehicle to grab onto Hubble and hurl it towards Earth to burn up in the atmosphere at the end of its life.