The final visit to dear, old friend: STS-125 launch on Monday

Dear all,

the final space shuttle service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, STS-125 (Atlantis), is scheduled for the coming Monday, 11. May, 2:01 EDT = 18:01 UTC = 20:01 CEST according to NASA Mission information:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/hst_sm4/index.html

The mission goals are the replacement of old gyroscopes, batteries and others as well as the installation of two new instruments, namely the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a high-sensitive UV spectrograph, and the Wide Field Camera 3, that will image in a wide range of wavelengths including IR, visibla and UV.

The most complicated task for the crew, however, will be the repairs of some partially broken instruments since those were never designed to be disassambled in space. Some  more info:

NASA:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/hst_sm4/overview.html

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125

The launch will probably webcast on NASA-TV,

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

This mission will be especially critical since in the case of a heat shield damage (like that one that caused the loss of space shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003) there will be no safe harbour in space The ISS is on a completely different orbit. In that unlucky case a spare shuttle (Endeavour) may be launched (hopefulle undamaged!) to rescue the Atlantis crew unless the damage can be fixed in situ.

Therefore, good luck to the crew of Atlantis!

Please also mind the launch of Herschel/Planck on Thursday, 14. May (Friedrich Wyrowsky already announced the Herschel launch party). The launch of the two space observatories on an Ariane 5ECA rocket is scheduled for 14. May, 13:12 UTC = 15:12 CEST. Webcast:

http://www.videocorner.tv/index.php?langue=en

Cheers,

Ingo Thies

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Ingo Thies

Argelander-Institut fuer Astronomie (AIfA)

Sternwarte, University of Bonn

Auf dem Huegel 71, D-53121 Bonn, Germany

Tel : +49 (0)228 73-3659

Mail: ithies@astro.uni-bonn.de