A large-screen film of the mission is expected to be released in 2010.
In one corner, the four astronauts who will walk in space to service Hubble, easy to spot because of their blue surgical caps, were checking out their dexterity with the tools they'll use to make repairs.
NASA likes to boast that the clean room, the largest of its kind in the world, is 1,000 times more sanitary than the typical hospital operating room.
Such sterile conditions are a necessity with state-of- the-art space optics, which can be damaged by a particle the width of a human hair.
"We don't want any surprises when we go into orbit," said Russ Werneth, a Hubble outreach coordinator at Goddard.
In a series of five spacewalks, astronauts will give the Hubble a new set of gyroscopes to stabilize the telescope and install both a thermal blanket to protect internal workings from the extreme temperatures of space and a new set of batteries to extend its lifespan to 2013.
Astronauts also will repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, a scientifc mainstay that has produced many of the striking images that adorn science classroom walls and computers screens around the world.
Astronauts also will install a new wide-field camera to study dark energy and a cosmic origins spectrograph that will examine the large scale structure of the universe.
The servicing mission was initially canceled in 2004 after the shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry in 2003. But under pressure from scientists, politicians and the public - and the resumption of shuttle flights to the International Space Station - NASA eventually reversed itself on Hubble.
Left on its own, the telescope would probably only last another couple of years, said Preston Burch, Hubble's program manager.
"Without the mission, it's hard to really say what the future of Hubble would be," he said.
Up to 8,800 scientists have used the archive of data Hubble has produced, and astronomers worldwide have written 7,724 scientific papers based on Hubble findings since its launch in 1990. The telescope is still responsible for about 12 discoveries a week, Leckrone said.
"It's simply the most productive telescope in history," added Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which oversees Hubble's scientific operations.
Together, the improvements should give Hubble unprecedented capabilities to shed light on how galaxies form, how stars are born and die, the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and the architecture of the universe itself, NASA says.
But the most significant achievements might be ones that are completely unexpected and impossible to predict, Lechrone said.
"We're going to stumble on the unexpected, as we always traditionally have," Lechrone said.
dennis.obrien@baltsun.com
