Mission-Specific

HST on orbit during a servicing mission
Hubble Space Telescope was successfully retrieved by astronaut Nancy Currie who then used the shuttle's remote manipulator arm to set the observatory into place in the shuttle bay.

Let’s take a break from our tour of the planets to visit the astronauts in the space shuttle Columbia. They’re on a mission for the next week to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Over the next few days they’ll be going out in pairs to do things like replace the observatory’s solar arrays, install a new instrument called the Advanced Camera for Surveys, upgrade the computer system, fix the cooling system on the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (called NICMOS for short), and a few other tasks.
Rather than take up your time with lots of description here, I’ll point you to the NASA TV link for the mission and you can watch for yourself. Most of the repair mission activities begin around 0630 GMT (the wee hours for folks in North America). You can get the latest schedule from this same site. Happy viewing!

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