Practicing a kind of catch-and-release astronomy, the astronauts of the space shuttle Atlantis oh-so-gently let the Hubble Space Telescope slip back into the heavens on Tuesday.
Times Topics: Hubble Space TelescopeReporting to mission control in Houston about 9 a.m. as the telescope and shuttle slowly drifted apart, Scott D. Altman, the Atlantis commander, called the last mission to refurbish the fabled telescope “an incredible journey” that demonstrated how humans could overcome challenges by working together.
“And that’s the thing that I think about Hubble — we’ve done it together,” Mr. Altman, a retired Navy captain, said. “And now Hubble can continue on its own, exploring the cosmos and bringing it home to us as we head for home in a few days.”
In five spacewalks over the last week, the astronauts brought two ailing instruments on the telescope back to life, installed two new ones and replaced the orbiting observatory’s gyroscopes and batteries. The refurbished telescope, astronomers and engineers say, should be good for five to seven more years in space.
“If I didn’t know better, I would have said that a miracle has happened here,” wrote Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in an e-mail message. “But ‘miracles’ simply happen when you combine the ingenuity of scientists and engineers with the resourcefulness and determination of astronauts and their trainers.”
Since its launching in 1990, the Hubble telescope has been reborn five times, by 16 astronauts performing 23 spacewalks, at a cost of $9.6 billion, according to NASA. For that, as the astronaut and Hubble repairman John M. Grunsfeld has said, humanity gained groundbreaking science and an icon of exploration.
Robert Kirshner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said of the telescope’s cosmic postcards: “Those fantastic images communicate the joy of finding out how the world works. I think this seeps into everything — and it makes us take more pleasure in knowing where we are in the universe, where we came from and where we are going.”
The telescope’s controllers say it will be late summer before the new and repaired instruments are calibrated and beaming down science again.
Once it was far enough away from the telescope, the shuttle fired its engines to drop down to a lower orbit where the danger from micrometeoroids was less than the 350-mile-high orbit of the telescope. The astronauts then inspected the shuttle’s heat shield to make sure it was safe for their return to Earth, which is scheduled for Friday.
Although the spacewalking is done, the astronauts have more on their schedule before then.
On Wednesday, they will hold a news conference in orbit. And Thursday they will testify from space before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, whose chairwoman is Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, an indefatigable supporter of the Hubble telescope.
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