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From: news@haddock.ima.isc.com (overhead)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: space news from May 7 AW&ST
Message-ID: <16794@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 5 Jun 90 16:43:32 GMT
References: <1990Jun5.041131.9222@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: suitti@anchovy.UUCP (Stephen Uitti)
Organization: Interactive Systems Co
Lines: 37

In article <1990Jun5.041131.9222@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>[This will be a real quickie, as I'm preparing to be away for two weeks
>and time is short.]

>Major article with pictures of HST deployment and a detailed account of
>the various post-deployment headaches.  [Sorry, I just don't have time
>to summarize two pages of dense information.]

Let's see, May 7th...

The first picture: an open star cluster, about 1,500 light years
from Earth, NGC 3532.  Focusing test delayed by a week due to
various problems.  The high gain antenna problem caused cascading
problems for most of a week.  A communications blackout for 3
hours...  The telescope entered an "inertial safe mode", from
which recovery was relativly quick.  When controllers commanded
Hubble's aperture door to open, two gyros went offline, causing
it to enter "software safe mode", but with a reasonable attitude.
34 hours later, new data and commands were sent to Hubble to
reconfigure it out of safe-mode.  More high-gain antenna based
delays.  The low gain antenna was used to get engineering data
from Hubble to deduce what was going on.  Final photos of Hubble
from Discovery showed the wire bowed slightly out of place near
the #2 dish antenna.  Tinkertoy technology & high tech graphics
were used to model the problem.  The high gain antennas were
reconfigured.  Checkout continued, but when checking the Pointing
and Safe mode Electronics Assembly, they forgot to inhibit the
aperture door.  The door closed, causing motion, causing entry
into safe mode again.  About five hours later, they were able
reopen the door.

Henry does a great job at these AW&ST space news summaries.
They are quite time consuming.  I'd have missed the bit about
Japanese Astronaut.  No way I'd have remembered the Journalists...

Stephen.
suitti@ima.ima.isc.com