Shuttle Atlantis Arrives at Launch Pad

September 5, 2008 — After delays caused by stormy weather and a minor technical problem, space shuttle Atlantis arrived at Launch Pad 39-A Thursday afternoon in preparation for its October 10 trip to service NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Managers cleared the shuttle’s move when an early morning weather briefing showed that Tropical Storm Hanna would remain far enough off shore. Atlantis began its trek from the Vehicle Assembly Building at 9:19 a.m. EST, arriving at the launch pad about six hours later. Repairs to the launch pad’s flame trench wall were completed Aug. 5 after crews installed a steel grid structure and covered it in a heat-resistant material. The pad’s north flame trench was damaged when bricks tore away from the wall during the May 31 launch of space shuttle Discovery. During its 11-day mission, the STS-125’s crew of seven astronauts will make revisions to the Hubble telescope that will mean six working, complementary science instruments with capabilities beyond those now available. The crew will complete five spacewalks to install new instruments and thermal blankets, repair two existing instruments, refurbish subsystems and replace gyroscopes and batteries. The changes will give the telescope an extended operational lifespan through at least 2013 and puts in place advanced technology that improves the discovery power of Hubble by 10 to 70 times. Scott Altman will command the mission. Gregory C. Johnson will be pilot. Mission specialists include John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Megan McArthur, Andrew Feustel and Michael Good. Facts and figures STS-125 is the 124th space shuttle flight, the fifth serving flight to the telescope, the 30th flight for Atlantis and the fourth flight in 2008. The weight of the payload is the heaviest ever carried aboard the shuttle on a Hubble servicing mission. Each Hubble orbit takes 96 minutes. Its speed is about 5 miles per second. During a typical orbit, Hubble uses the same energy as 28 100-watt light bulbs. Among Hubble's greatest discoveries is determining the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) and finding that virtually all major galaxies have a super massive black hole at their center. The farthest objects Hubble has seen are galaxies more than 12 billion light years away.

Space shuttle Atlantis stands poised on the launch pad after its trek from the Vehicle Assembly Building. Image credit: NASA A worker watches the rollout of space shuttle Atlantis as viewed from inside the Launch Control Center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

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