Thursday, May 21, 2009

A Look Inside NASA's Custom Hubble Repair Toolkit

Hubble Drill: A high-speed, low-torque drill for removing Hubble's many screws during spacewalks. Michael Soluri/NPR

From Popsci.com:

Fixing the most advanced telescope in space requires more than a trip to Home Depot

Earlier today, astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis released the Hubble Space Telescope back into orbit after a successful mission to repair and upgrade NASA's famous orbiting observatory.

The mission was intensive, especially considering almost all of the repairs that were performed during a series of TK spacewalks were on parts that were never intended to be serviced by astronauts in space. Equally intense (and beautiful) are the 180 tools NASA employed for the job--with 116 of them created specifically for this mission.

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