[background music]
You are now in the exhibit hallway outside of the
Operations Support Room, which displays some of the hardware
that once flew on Hubble. In the built-in display case you see a
black electronic control box. It was used to control gyroscopes -
the sensors that can tell how fast Hubble is turning and in
what direction. During the first servicing mission in 1993,
astronauts replaced this control box and learned that it had a
bad capacitor. It was fixed so that it could potentially be
used on Hubble again, but it was never needed. Farther over is
one of the original tape recorders used for storing
science and engineering data. During the second servicing
mission in 1997, the tape recorder was replaced with a
solid state recorder, similar to a USB memory stick, which could
hold 10 times more information. This was important as Hubble
would later be upgraded with better cameras that had over six
times the resolution – requiring more storage space. On the
opposite wall, standalone display cases contain tools
developed to help astronauts work on Hubble. The Mini Power
Tool is a power screwdriver with LED lights and interchangeable
screwdriver bits. It is connected to a battery pack so
that it is smaller and easier to handle. The tool was optimized
so that astronauts could remove over 100 small screws during an
instrument repair. The bits are color coded so that the
astronauts can find the right bit faster. Their bit caddy, a
device built to carry the bits and hold them in place, can hold
7 bits at a time. Moving along, the standalone display case to
the right discusses technologies developed for this remarkable
observatory that have made their way into everyday products here
on earth. These include digital mammography systems that use a
Hubble camera detector that is used in the fight against breast
cancer and a sky map computer program used by amateur
astronomers that is based on Hubble’s star catalog. On the
walls to the left of the standalone display cases hang
various awards received by the operations team as well as a
letter from the President of the United States congratulating the
team on 25 years of Hubble operations.