STS-82 Day 9 Highlights
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- On Wednesday, February 19, 1997, 6:00 a.m. CST, STS-82 MCC Status Report # 17
reports:
- Discovery's astronauts bid farewell to the Hubble Space Telescope
early this morning as they placed the orbiting observatory back into
its own orbit to continue its investigation of the far reaches of the
universe.
- Mission Specialist Steve Hawley, who first deployed Hubble during the
STS-31 mission on April 25th, 1990, again used the Shuttle's robot arm
to gently release the telescope at 12:41 a.m. Central time. At the
time of deployment, the Shuttle was at an altitude of 334 nautical
miles over the southwest coast of Africa. Hubble is now operating at
the highest altitude it has ever flown, a 335 by 321 nautical mile
orbit.
- Within minutes after Hubble was set free, Commander Ken Bowersox and
Pilot Scott Horowitz fired jet thrusters to begin Discovery's
seperation from the telescope. Shortly after deployment, payload
controllers reported that the telescope had resumed standard
operations and was processing commands from the ground through the
Tracking Data Relay Satellite system. Over the next several weeks,
calibrations of the newly installed instruments will be made as Hubble
resumes its scientific efforts, equipped with two new science
instruments, updated guidance systems and a state of the art data
recorder. The first images and data from the newly installed
scientific components, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and
the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, may be
acquired from Hubble in about eight to ten weeks.
- A few hours after Hubble's deployment, the crew received a
congratulatory phone call from NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin. The
four spacewalking crewmembers also answered questions from several
news networks regarding their work over the past week to upgrade the
telescope.
- Discovery's crew will begin an nine hour sleep period at 8:25 this
morning and will be awakened at 5:25 this afternoon to begin routine
prelanding checks of Discovery's flight control systems and reaction
control system jets. Discovery is scheduled to return to the Kennedy
Space Center early Friday morning, with landing scheduled at 12:48
a.m. Central time.
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