GREENBELT — GREENBELT - In about two weeks, some 24,000 pounds of what may be the most thoroughly-tested and closely-inspected hardware on earth will be packed into custom crates, mounted on flatbed trucks and shipped as "wide load" cargo to Cape Canaveral, Fla.
When it arrives, the one-of-a kind camera and spectrograph, now being stored at the Goddard Space Flight Center, will be inspected once more, loaded on to the space shuttle Atlantis and launched into orbit 350 miles above the earth. There, astronauts will rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope for a long-delayed, 11-day servicing mission.
The $900 million effort, scheduled for launch Oct. 8, will be the last of five Hubble servicing missions, and engineers and scientists here have great hopes for the upgrade to one of the world's best known scientific instruments.
"I think it will put Hubble at the apex of its capabilities," David Lechrone, senior project scientist for Hubble, told reporters at a press briefing yesterday.
Lechrone and other NASA scientists are gearing up for the launch at NASA Goddard, which manages Hubble's day to day operations. Scientific operations are based at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the John Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.
Scientists at Goddard are testing sensitive scientific equipment in an acoustic chamber to make sure that what goes into space can withstand the violent shaking that characterizes every shuttle launch and the eight-minute ride into orbit.
Engineers are testing containers with weights and cranes to make sure they won't fall apart under stress and reviewing a wide range of contingency plans for scaling back on the space walks and repairs to Hubble if there are equipment failures.
"We've been getting ready for this since August of last year, trying to think up every possible scenario," said Keith Walyus, Hubble mission operations manager.
The activity appeared to be nonstop yesterday in the space flight center's "clean room," a cavernous, sealed-up hall with a ceiling 90-feet high and air that's filtered and recirculated every 90 seconds.
At any moment, as many as 42 engineers, scientists and astronauts - wearing sanitary white "bunny suits," surgical masks, booties and caps - were visible from an observation window, huddled over equipment bound for space.
