The launch of the HST was delayed due to the Challenger disaster in 1986, but in October 1989 the telescope was moved from Lockheed, California to its launch site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and on 24 April 1990 the HST was launched aboard the STS-31 mission of the Discovery space shuttle.
As soon as the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in space, it became apparent that the primary mirror was the wrong shape. The 2.4 m concave mirror was too shallow by 2 mm at the edge and this caused light from the outer part of the mirror to converge to an F/24 focal point some 38 mm behind the light from the central region. As a result star images were surrounded by haloes, several being seconds in diameter instead of being pin sharp and only a fraction of a second in diameter. The primary mirror was clearly suffering from a severe case of spherical aberration, and it was later found that this was the result of faulty testing in the optical works, because one test component was 1.3 mm out of position. Five 6-hour space walks were required to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
On 2 December 1993 the first servicing mission (STS-61) was launched aboard space shuttle Endeavour and on 4 December the mission commander, Colonel Richard Covey, piloted the shuttle to within 30 ft of the telescope. The astronauts, in pairs, did the necessary work during five spacewalks, a record for a single mission and four of the telescope’s six gyroscopes were replaced. On 5 December the two solar panels, which had been vibrating as a result of extreme changes in temperature, were replaced. On 6–7 December two astronauts replaced the Hubble’s primary camera, which had the flawed mirror, and also replaced two magnetic sensors, which measured the telescope’s position in the magnetic field. On 13 December the shuttle landed at Cape Canaveral, but it was another month before astronomers saw the first photographs from the repaired telescope. On 13 January 1994, NASA officials released photographs taken after the repairs, images that were much clearer than those taken earlier. One subject of the new photographs was the core of a galaxy 50 million light years distant. The astronauts had installed COSTAR (Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement) to rectify the problem with the telescope’s primary mirror.
The instrument most affected by the poor images was the Wide Field and Planetary Camera, (WFPC), which the astronauts had completely replaced with a new one (WFPC2). WFPC2 incorporates secondary mirrors that have been deliberately figured high at the edges so that they introduce spherical aberration of the same magnitude as that of the HST primary mirror but of the opposite nature so that they should send corrected images to the CCD sensors.
The F/24 light beam from the main telescope is first fed to one of the instruments by a movable mirror. In the case of the WFPC the light then goes to a pyramid mirror which directs the beam into one of four CCD cameras. Each camera has a different focal length and one is chosen to give the most suitable size of image on the CCD sensor. The cameras are of the Cassegrain mirror type and it is the Cassegrain secondary mirror of each camera which has been specially figured with the right amount of spherical aberration.
Incredibly this corrective aberration has been incorporated in mirrors which are only one centimetre in diameter. Alignment of these mirrors is extremely critical so they are provided with positional adjustments which can be operated from the ground control centre.
The other instruments in the HST are a Faint Object Camera, a High Resolution Spectrograph, a Faint Object Spectrograph and a High Speed Photometer. To improve the images in these instruments NASA arranged to fit one corrective optical system common to them all, known as COSTAR. As COSTAR required some space the astronauts had to take out the least used of the instruments, the High Speed Photometer and replace it with COSTAR, which is in the form of a box about the size of a small refrigerator. In that box have been fitted ten mirrors, twelve DC motors, four movable arms and many sensors. As well as installing W17PC and COSTAR, astronauts in the Space Shuttle Endeavour replaced the solar cell arrays which have been troubled by jitter, and also three gyroscopes which are essential for measuring the telescope motions about its three axes of rotation. The telescope was equipped with three pairs of gyros, but one gyro in each pair had already failed – if one more gyro had failed the telescope would have become inoperable. According to Sky and Telescope, even if there had been no problems with HST’s optics or solar cells, NASA would have sent up a repair team just to replace the gyros.
In 1994 HST sent back images of the Orion Nebula. The images released by NASA depicted the births of planets near newborn stars.
In November 1995 NASA released images of the Eagle Nebula, which confirmed the birth of stars.
In 1996 “Deep Field” images were sent back by the telescope, providing an insight into the history of the universe, dating back more than 10 billion years.
During the second servicing mission in February 1997, scientists updated some of Hubble’s instruments and in October, NASA extended Hubble’s operations from 2005 to 2010.
In 1999 HST shut down when a fourth gyroscope on board the telescope failed. Servicing Mission 3A (STS-103) was launched in December.
In 2002 Servicing Mission 3B was launched for the installation of the NICMOS Cooling System (NCS).
In 2003 HST viewed the core of one of the nearest globular star clusters, called NGC 6397.
The next servicing mission was cancelled after the Shuttle Columbia accident and the NASA Administrator decided to cancel all further HST on-orbit servicing, including Servicing Mission 4, a decision based on the risks to the Shuttle astronauts associated with future HST servicing missions.
The depressed astronaut
The third US astronaut aboard Mir was John F. Blaha. The daily life of US astronauts aboard Mir was dictated by a schedule devised by the NASA ground crew at TsUP, which had to be approved by Russian ground control before it was sent up to the astronaut. This approval was known as a Form 24. Blaha was having difficulty performing his tasks because the times allowed were not realistic, based on conditions in the shuttle. In addition his Russian wasn’t very good.
Blaha had to work with a constantly changing operations team on the ground, some of whom were new to the job and did not know what Blaha had already done. Several times he was told to do work he had already done, for example, the SAMS calibration device. This was a series of sensors, each the size of a softball, used to study vibrations and structural stress. Having stayed up late several nights looking for it in vain, a new operations leader told him to find it again.
The Russian commander, Valery Korzun, spoke up for him and his work schedule was reduced by 25 per cent. Burrough:
Even with the reduced workload, Blaha was approaching a state of exhaustion. The workdays aboard Mir ran fourteen hours and longer. “I can’t do this anymore,” he finally told Korzun. “I’m fifty-four years old, and I’m not going to make it if I continue at this pace.” At night Blaha lay awake in his sleeping bag, strapped to the floor down in Spektr, and obsessed about his workload. “It just drove me into some kind of protective envelope,” Blaha recalls. “I wasn’t happy. I just wasn’t happy. I was trying to run up a mountain, and the Russians were trying to help me, and the Americans were trying to bring me down.” Many nights he called up the computerized scrapbook Brenda had made for him and looked through pictures of his children and grandchildren.
For the first time in his long career in space, Blaha was desperately unhappy. Nothing about the mission, a mission he had worked more than two years for, had gone as planned. Nothing about it was fun. He realized he was withdrawing from Korzun and Kaleri and snapping at the ground. It took a long time for him to acknowledge that something was wrong, and when he finally did he realized it was something worse than simple sadness.
It was depression. He realized he was suffering through a mild depression. The thought stunned him. Blaha had always thought of himself as a can-do guy, a fighter pilot, a positive thinker, the kind of person who helped his crewmates through whatever dark nights of the soul they encountered. The idea that he could be facing depre
ssion was almost too much to comprehend. Of course he told no one – not Korzun or Kaleri, not Brenda, not Al Holland, and certainly not his ground team, who he felt would use it as more evidence that he wasn’t pulling his load.
Once he suspected the problem was depression, Blaha characteristically attacked it in a methodical, thought-out manner. Lying awake at night, he probed for the reasons he felt the way he did.
John, you love space, you’ve always enjoyed space. Why don’t you love space now? Yes, working with Korzun and Kaleri had been a surprise, but they were good men, ready to listen to his suggestions. They were professionals. It was the Americans he couldn’t abide. The people on the ground have no idea what is going on. No concept. And they won’t even acknowledge that this is the truth.
When he thought it through, he realized he couldn’t blame poor Caasi Moore. Moore had been thrown into the process at so late a date, no one could have gotten up to speed in time for the mission. And Pat McGinnis? Blaha could hardly blame the young flight doc for gravitating toward other, more interesting astronauts. No, the man he blamed was Frank Culbertson. There at night, alone with his thoughts, he pondered Culbertson for hours. Culbertson was a nice man, everyone agreed. But his incompetence, Blaha felt, was startling. Culbertson seemed to float above the fray, paying far more attention to George Abbey than his own astronauts. “If I was Frank Culbertson’s boss,” Blaha began saying, “I would put him in jail.”
Korzun and Kaleri saw what Blaha was going through. “The first sign John was in a depressive state was he didn’t have a desire to speak. When we saw this, we tried to get him out of this state. We spoke to him about things that had nothing to do with space. We spoke about [life on] the ground, about our childhoods; we found subjects that were dear to him. He spoke about his family. We tried to help him do his work. John always offered to help us, but since we saw the state he was in, we gave him more free time, to watch movies and [NASA videotapes of] baseball and football games. When we realized he liked the amateur radio, we worked to give him more time on that.” Adds Kaleri, “We tried to calm him down by telling him a lot of other people had been through things like this.”
Lying awake at night, Blaha began repeating a single thought, mantra-like. John, this is the environment you’re in. You used to love space. You sparkled in space. And now whatever’s going on, you need to accept this. Valery and Sasha are the two human beings in your life now. The ground doesn’t matter. You need to accept this till the shuttle can come.
Bit by bit, day by day, he came out of it. He started a new routine that conserved his energy and improved his spirits. Every morning after breakfast he began talking on the ham radio in base block, chatting with American amateurs in snippets of a few minutes apiece; Mir moved so quickly across the surface of the Earth it was difficult to maintain a longer signal. At night he tried to finish work at eight and watch a movie. His favorite tapes were old Super Bowls and Dallas Cowboy football games, all of which Al Holland and the NASA psychological support team had sent to the station for him.
Kaleri and Korzun realized the worst had passed one evening when Blaha lingered at the dinner table while the Russians took turns exercising on the treadmill. Up till that point Blaha had never bothered to eat meals with the two Russians, sticking instead to his shuttle-like regimen of eating when he could. “He didn’t talk to us, he just worked,” remembers Kaleri. “For me the first sign he was changing to our lifestyle was on this evening. He didn’t have dinner without us. At first we kept on exercising. We said, ‘John, go ahead, eat.’ He said, ‘No, I’ll wait.’ And he ate with us! From that moment on, it was a totally different life for John. We discovered John was an entirely different person. He liked to talk! We started communicating with him. It was wonderful.”
Blaha’s astronaut replacement was Jerry Linenger, a US Navy doctor. By the time Linenger arrived Blaha was exhausted and on 22 January he left vowing never to do it again.
Linenger spent his days running NASA experiments, for example, Liquid Metal Diffusion, an experiment he ran from a laptop. “Space is a frontier and I’m out here exploring,” he wrote to his son. He exercised regularly on the treadmill, his running making the whole station resonate.
Mir’s Kurs system fails
On 12 February 1997 Soyuz-TM25 stopped 150m from Mir. Soyuz-TM25 contained Vasily Tsibliyev, Aleksandr “Sasha” Lazutkin and the German “guest” cosmonaut Reinhard Ewald, who would return to earth with Korzun and Kaleri on 2 March. The changeover period with six people aboard was a crowded time.
As the Kurs system guided them in automatically, 250 miles above the earth, and the distance closed to less than eight feet, a warning came on which said “Approach failure 05”. The braking thrusters fired automatically – the Kurs system had failed 5m out.
The Kurs system was originally made in the Ukraine. After the Ukrainians had put up the price of the equipment by 400 per cent, there were problems getting them to deliver a radar antenna for the Soyuz so the Russians had built their own which repeatedly failed to work in tests because its signal overlapped with that of another antenna in one of the station’s systems. The Soyuz drifted away from the station until it was 12m off. TsUP ordered a manual docking. Tsibliyev brought the Soyuz in inch by inch and made a successful dock, which entitled him to a $1,000 bonus.
The fire aboard Mir
The fire occurred during the changeover period between Mir 22 and Mir 23. After dinner on 23 February, at 10 pm, Linenger went to Spektr to set up a study experiment, while Lazutkin went to Kvant to put a fresh Lithium perchlorate cylinder in the solid-fuel oxygen generator (SFOG) as it was necessary to generate additional oxygen during “changeover”. Burrough:
He had just inserted the new cylinder when he heard a hissing noise. He turned and saw sparks flying from the top of the cylinder. Before he could react there was a flame which he described as “a baby volcano”. He remembered thinking: This is unusual. It shouldn’t be doing this. Why is it doing this? My first idea was I had done something wrong.
He shouted, “Guys we have a fire!” but no one heard him.
Hovering at the base-block table about ten feet from where Lazutkin was marveling at the “baby volcano” he had somehow created, Reinhold Ewald was the first to react. “I saw flame spitting out of the device, literally into Sasha’s hand,” he remembered.
“Pozhar,” Ewald said, mouthing the Russian word for fire.
At first Tsibliyev, who was in the air just across the table from Ewald, his back to Kvant, didn’t think anyone had heard the German’s words. Tsibliyev remembered: I see Ewald’s face, I read his lips, he says the word so softly, I didn’t think anyone hears him.
Turning, Tsibliyev saw the fire erupting in front of Lazutkin and repeated the word, this time loudly: “Pozhar!”
Tsibliyev recalled: “I said, ‘Pozhar,’ but I didn’t think anyone believed me.”
Valery Korzum did. Korzum, hovering above and to Ewald’s right, could not at first see into Kvant. Lowering his head to peer inside, he instantly saw flashes of bright orange and white flame erupting all around Lazutkin. In a split second, he pushed off from a side wall and flew across the table, cutting through a gap between Tsibliyev and Kaleri. In moments he was past the toilet entrance and into Kvant.
“Pozhar! Pozhar!” Korzun hollered as he passed. Smoke, grayish and white, was already enveloping Lazutkin.
“Korzun flew in like this giant hawk,” Lazutkin remembered with a smile. It was so like the commander, the strapping, macho Cossack coming to his smaller friend’s rescue. As Korzun settled at his side, Lazutkin reached out and switched off the red-hot canister, but it had no effect. The oxygen from the canister was obviously fueling the fire, creating the blowtorch effect. The flame was shooting up into the open air in the center of the module, flashes of sharp red and pink, at a 45 degree angle in front of him. It seemed to be nearly two feet long and growing.
Lazutkin jerked a wet towel from a holder on the wall and threw it o
nto the flame, which instantly engulfed it. Flaming bits of towel swirled up and around the module. Lazutkin ducked back, fearing his hair would catch on fire. Korzun, hovering at his side, immediately realized the flame was too big to be smothered.
“Get the fire extinguishers!” he said.
Fire in a zero-gravity environment is not something human beings know much about. Both Linenger and Shannon Lucid, in fact, ran experiments in which they observed an open flame in a self-contained glovebox. It is gravity that causes a flame on Earth to flicker upward; in zero gravity, fire expands in all directions at the same speed, creating a flame that looks like a burning ball. The fire that erupted in front of Sasha Lazutkin looked nothing like a ball, however. Oxygen roaring out of the SFOG sent it shooting outward much as it would on Earth.
Everyone in base block was startled by Korzun’s sudden call for fire extinguishers. Hovering at the dinner table, his back to the fire, Sasha Kaleri turned to see it and immediately realized what was happening. To him the fire appeared a reddish shining in the air; he saw sparks cascading through the module around Lazutkin. Much like Lazutkin, he resisted a powerful impulse to leap into the module and attempt to smother the fire. Two people are already a crowd, he remembered thinking. When Korzun called out for a fire extinguisher, Kaleri had a small problem: the postcards and envelopes in his hands. As fast as he could, he jammed several into niches beneath the table and others into a nearby sack.
Sitting beside Kaleri, Tsibliyev, who served on the fire brigade at his Crimean grade school, didn’t need to be told to grab fire extinguishers. There were two attached to the walls in base block, and the moment Korzun soared into Kvant, Tsibliyev flew over and grabbed one. The other he reached just as Kaleri tore it from its holder. Kaleri took one of the fire extinguishers and passed it through the hatch to Lazutkin, who quickly passed it to Korzun.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 38
