GREENBELT -- When folks at the Goddard Space Flight Center talk, Hubble listens.
And then the flying space telescope -- the size of a city bus with wings -- responds. It turns its myopic eye toward a speck of light in the galaxy and locks onto it. It snaps a picture of a storm swirling around Saturn. It waits until a spinning blue ball called Earth passes from its field of vision so it can peer into the heavens again.
All of this and so much more has gone on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for three years and counting, because the Hubble Space Telescope never sleeps. In 100 bits of data per second, the billion-dollar space observatory receives instructions from this NASA installation: 100,000 commands a week, and that's just in pursuit of great science. There are 70,000 more, relayed by the Goddard crew, that control the telescope's internal operations.
Whispering to Hubble
For the next nine days, as the astronauts aboard the Shuttle Endeavour undertake a complex mission to repair the telescope's flawed vision and replace worn-out parts, a troop of engineers and mission planners at Goddard will be whispering in Hubble's ear. In much the same way that the astronauts' work is planned to the minute, so too is Hubble's.
Since Monday, the Goddard contingent has been working round-the-clock at a bank of computer consoles in Building 13 at the sprawling facility in suburban Prince George's County.
"We do everything they [astronauts] do up there, only we're on the ground and we're in shirt-sleeves," said Preston Burch, deputy project manager of telescope operations at Goddard.
Moves reflected in space
While that's not literally the case, many of the astronauts' maneuvers to fix Hubble during the five planned spacewalks will follow a Goddard-directed move by Hubble. Before the effort early today by the Endeavour crew to capture Hubble, the Goddard crew was to tell Hubble to fold up its satellite dishes, which extend on arms on either side of the craft. Before astronauts Kathryn Thornton and Tom Akers can replace Hubble's shaky solar panels early tomorrow, the telescope must retract them.
Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore determine the kind of science observations Hubble makes. But the folks at Goddard physically program the telescope's computer to perform the work and monitor Hubble's operations to ensure it's doing its job.
Observatory monitored
