At home, you might find Matt Ashmore reaching into his tool chest for the right socket wrench to speed up the restoration of his 1969 Dodge Polara.
But at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the 30-year-old aerospace engineer has spent the past several years developing a sleek new power screwdriver for spacewalking NASA astronauts. They'll need it to pop the hoods of two broken-down scientific instruments on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
Ashmore heads a team of more than 35 in Goddard's Crew Aids and Tools Development office in Greenbelt. Their job is to invent and build tools for Hubble servicing missions. For the fifth and final repair call on Hubble, set for May, the astronauts will carry 140 custom tools into orbit - a record.
"More than any other tool we've built for the crew in the past," he says of his screwdriver, "we really tried to concentrate on ergonomics: How well can you see what you're working on? How comfortable is it in your hand?" Carefully designed tools are critical for work in space, says astronaut John Grunsfeld, who will be on the mission. "Hubble repairs are all about the tools," he says.
Some tools, like Ashmore's "mini power driver," have been in development since Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph broke down in 2004. Others have been crafted since September, when a key science data computer stopped working.
When problems arise, Grunsfeld points out, "we overcome those difficulties by making better tools. ... Humans are master tool-builders."
Grunsfeld was in Goddard's 1.2 million-cubic-foot "clean room" to practice with tools designed to repair Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, which shut down early in 2007 because of an electrical failure.
Dressed in a dust-free "bunny suit," he rehearsed each step of the repair, standing inside a full-scale replica of the telescope's instrument bay - identical except that when he drops things, they clang to the floor instead of floating off into space.
With Ashmore's mini power driver, he turned dozens of screws to open an electronics box. The screws were captured by another Goddard-designed tool - a plastic tray, more or less. Holes allow the screwdriver's bits in, but loose screws are trapped so they don't drift into space.
"We put a lot of emphasis on making sure we have the right tools, and making sure they're easy to use," says Grunsfeld, who will be making his fifth shuttle flight and his third to service Hubble. "They are works of art."
