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(music)

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I'm Kathy Thornton. I was a mission specialist on the first service mission

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on Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. It's amazing to me when I was flying

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in space, orbiting, that I could look back at the Earth and you don't see a lot of

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evidence that we're here, but yet those little tiny beings down on Earth that I

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can't see we're smart enough to get me there.  We were not the most significant

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part. We might have been the most visible, but the real heroes of the service

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missions are the people who figure out how to do it. The people who came up with

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Russ: My name is Russ Werneth. I've been involved with all five of the

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Hubble Servicing Missions. Back in 1993 when we did our first servicing mission,

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I was involved in designing all the tools that we use. Kathy: On that mission, we did

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five spacewalks. I did the second and the fourth one. On my spacewalks we put in a

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new solar array and we installed the COSTAR, which included the corrective

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optics for all the axial instruments in the bottom part of the telescope.

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Kathy: We think a lot about the engineering technology that goes into Hubble

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and makes it work, and the innovation and design that goes into the fixes for the

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Hubble and every new instrument that goes up in the Hubble. And those are

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pretty amazing, but the purpose of the Hubble is science.

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The purpose of Hubble is to help us learn about where we came from. About

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what happened before us in this universe.

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Kathy: Servicing the Hubble one more time is well worth the risk to

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the crew and to the vehicle and to the Hubble itself. Every time we touch it you

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know, we plan to make it better, but you could always make it worse.

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And so there's some risk to the telescope as well. Russ: When we plan for a

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servicing mission with the astronauts, we always ask ourselves the questions 'what if.'

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What if this tool were to fail? What if this procedure wouldn't work? And

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therefore we do all the training that's necessary.

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We have contingency tools, we have backup tools, we have backup procedures.

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There was a hand rail that had to be removed, and as much as we practiced on

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the ground with tools and procedures, that hand rail couldn't be removed

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because of one of the bolts. As Mike Massimino was working, in real time with his

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EVA, his spacewalk, we were working on the ground to figure out how we could

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solve that problem. And we went through several levels of contingency.

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Then ultimately, it came down to just using brute force on that hand rail to

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get that bolt to break. And we've essentially been able to leave a new telescope every

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time we finish up a servicing mission. Kathy: I

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have a picture on my wall of the first Hubble Deep Field photos, where

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Hubble was pointed at place in the sky where there wasn't anything.

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But imagine that you could look through a straw or a pinhole and find a place

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in the sky where there's absolutely nothing, and know that there are millions

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of galaxies in that little pinhole that you're looking at. I think more than

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anything else Hubble is an icon of science, of exploration, and of the things

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we as humans can do.

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(music)