>>KATRINA: The Hubble Space Telescope, after
over a decade of development, was finally launched on Tuesday,
April 24th, 1990, with the Space Shuttle crew of
STS-31. The next several days would include a lot of long, stressful hours
for the Hubble operations team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Problems kept
popping up, with the pressure of the entire world watching. But,
even under pressure, engineers are capable of some pretty creative problem-solving.
[music]
[shimmering music] >>JOHN: The week that Hubble deployed
was a very intense week for all of us here. >>DAVE: NASA had beat the drums
pretty loudly for HST, so everybody was watching.
Everybody was paying attention. [digital beeps]
>>LARRY: Yeah on a Friday morning at about 4:30,
we noticed that we were getting what we call "safemode counts".
>>JOHN: There were high torques developing in the high-gain antenna that we didn't
expect. >>LARRY: The high-gain antennas are our main
way to communicate with the ground, to get our science data there. And we have two
high-gain antennas, one on each side. >>DAVE: The spacecraft had noticed that
when it tried to move one of the antennas, there was resistance, and
the spacecraft was programmed such that if it felt continued resistance,
it would just declare sort of a "I'm not going to go any further with this."
>>LARRY: On Saturday, we had gotten a tiger team together and looked at the
high torques we had seen on the high-gain antenna on Friday. About 2:00 we
turned it back on again, tried to move it again, and immediately we saw we were still
getting high torques on there. >>JOHN: When I walked into the building on Sunday, after
having gotten a little bit of sleep, operations of the Hubble had
basically stopped. >>DAVE: The managers put all of the technical people in a room
and said, "Figure this out." Today, you would bring it up on a screen
and you would move the thing around and you would see what's going on. But these were
much more primitive days. >>JOHN: So I was with my hands trying to figure out what
the various positions of the high-gain antenna motors
were. >>DAVE: We were able to find some loose-leaf binder sort of things
with a lot of photos of the high-gain antenna. >>JOHN: I saw this cable loop
and it appeared to me to be at an odd position. Somewhere along the line, I
just, I said probably half jokingly, "Boy, if I had a set of Tinkertoys,
I could build a little model of this and show you guys what's going on."
>>DAVE: You're sitting in a room with the highest power of people in the business,
and you're proposing to go get a child's toy to help solve the problem.
>>JOHN: Dave Skillman pulled me aside. He looked me straight in the face
and he said, "Were you serious about that?" >>DAVE: I just kind of let myself out of the room
and drove to the nearby Toys 'R' Us.
People were asking me, "Can I help you?" and I'm going, "Not easily...
This is not really the spacecraft aisle." >>JOHN: And about
an hour later, he came back. And I sat down at the table,
he sat down next to me, and I put together a
little working model of the high-gain antenna. And then right
away, when I moved the two gimbals to the positions that
they had been at when the torque occurred, sure enough, this
little Tinkertoy model of a counterweight was right
in contact with this electrical extension cord. >>LARRY: It was amazing how it actually
allowed us to visualize what's going on out there in space.
>>JOHN: This area of high torque was really a relatively small piece
of the operational area of the high-gain. As long as we stayed away from that
obstruction, there was a whole, you know, huge range of motion of the
antenna that we would be able to operate. >>DAVE: The model was able to convince the
politicians and the managers that we did understand the problem.
And then the technical guys had figured out what we needed to do to fix the problem.
>>JOHN: 9:00 that night, Sunday night, we went into the control room,
and the folks in command sent the commands up.
>>LARRY: And immediately we saw those torque levels go down, when we turned it on and
started to back it away. And we all breathed a big sigh of relief.
We were saying, "okay, we didn't break it, we think it's still operational." If we hadn't had use
of the high-gain, that would have been a big impact to Hubble.
[transitioning music] >>KATRINA: With the telescope now
fully deployed, the Hubble operations team could finally catch their breath.
And then, a couple months later, people discovered that devastating
problem with Hubble's flawed primary mirror, a huge blow to the project.
But incredibly, the Hubble team worked through it and found a solution to that problem
and to many more obstacles over the next 25 years. So, stay tuned
for more Hubble Memorable Moments.
[spacecraft whooshes by] [beep beep, beep beep]
[beep beep, beep beep, beep beep]