[background music]
Welcome to mission control for the iconic Hubble Space
Telescope. This is a virtual 360 degree tour of the facility, so
look around. You are currently in the lobby outside of the
Space Telescope Operations Control Center at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center where the day to day operations for Hubble
are conducted. The tour starts next to a 1/5th scale model of
Hubble. The real telescope is about the size of a large
school bus, and would weigh 27,000 pounds on earth. Hubble
works like many backyard telescopes. It has two main
mirrors to gather light from the Universe and bring it into
focus: a primary mirror almost 8 feet across, and a secondary
mirror that is one foot across. Light that enters the telescope
hits the main mirror and gets reflected toward the smaller
secondary mirror. The secondary mirror then reflects the light
back through a small hole in the primary, where it enters
Hubble’s science instruments housed in the back part of the
spacecraft. Hubble has three types of instruments that
analyze light from the universe: Cameras such as its main camera
– the Wide Field Camera 3; spectrographs such as Hubble’s
newest one, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph; And
interferometers which are called Fine Guidance Sensors. In the
middle of the spacecraft there are four 100-pound reaction
wheels used to reorient the observatory. Based upon Newton’s
Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction — turning a reaction wheel in one direction
causes Hubble to turn the opposite way. Because Hubble is
so massive, it only turns at the speed of a minute hand on a
clock. On the wall you see two images of an incredible star
nursery in the Eagle Nebula nicknamed the Pillars of
Creation. These images, among Hubble’s most famous, reveal how
different the pillars appear in visible light and in
near-infrared light. The visible-light image shows small
tips that contain newborn stars and budding stars. The
near-infrared light can see through much of the gas and
dust, revealing thousands of stars behind the nebula and
inside the pillars. Further over, you see another image on
the wall of astronauts in space servicing Hubble. These
servicing missions included numerous spacewalks to help fix
and upgrade the telescope. The astronauts left Hubble in
outstanding condition in 2009 during the final servicing
mission and it is still at the peak of its scientific
capability today. Over by the windows is a tool box that was
used to transport tools into space. Known as the Auxiliary
Transport Module, it provided storage for the tools and safe
passage to and from orbit, protecting the tools from the
extreme cold of space. Two similar enclosures flew aboard
the final Hubble servicing mission. You are now in the
Mission Operations Room. This is the command center where flight
engineers communicate with Hubble. Every day they send
commands to Hubble’s computers to perform daily tasks, such as
coordinating the science instruments. They also retrieve
all of Hubble’s science and engineering data and make sure
that none of it is missing or corrupted. The flight engineers
are also responsible for monitoring the 10,000 plus items
in that engineering data to make sure that Hubble is operating
safely and properly. If something isn’t working
correctly, they follow prepared contingency plans. Right now the
team is doing routine activities that include uplinking orbit
information and clearing memory on the spacecraft for new
messages. Prior to 2011, this room was staffed 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. But now most of the daily functions are
automated and it is only staffed 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If
a problem comes up while the team is not present, they
receive notifications on their cell phones, which they can use
to access some of the spacecraft information and determine how
serious the issue is. Depending on the severity, they may have
to come into this room to address the issue. As you look
around the room you will see a large screen with a graphical
display of Hubble that is driven with real-time data. It includes
accurate star charts, the Earth’s position, the Sun’s
location, and other environmental data to allow the
team to see how Hubble is oriented. An operations clock in
the corner of the room can be set to track the length of an
event, or simply display the current time, in Universal Time
- a standard time used in astronomy and spacecraft
operations. A model of the main spacecraft computer sits in the
back of the room. The actual computer on Hubble manages the
spacecraft’s daily functions such as its power,
communications, and pointing, and it monitors the health of
the spacecraft. It’s also programmed to put Hubble in a
safe state and be ready to talk to the ground if a major problem
occurs. An engineering model of the spacecraft is also in the
back of the room, which flight engineers can use for reference
if they need to. You have now entered the Operations Support
Room. This is where engineers and specialists run tests before
sending new updates to Hubble. This ensures that these
additions will not cause anything unexpected to happen on
the spacecraft. Today engineers are testing potential changes to
Hubble’s pointing control system. This room is also used
to figure out what’s going on when the spacecraft isn’t
operating as expected. The behavior could be caused by a
hardware failure, a strike from a high-energy particle, a
fluctuation in electrical current, or something else. Once
they know the cause, the team figures out how to get the
spacecraft back to normal operations. As you look around
the room, you’ll see a world map on the large middle screen at
the front. This shows engineers whether Hubble is in sunlight or
darkness, where it is with respect to ground stations, and
whether it is passing through a high-radiation zone. Another
large display on the left of the front wall shows a ground-based
image of what astronomical object Hubble is scheduled to be
looking at. This same display is available to anyone on NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope website. In the back of the room is a
model of Hubble in the space shuttle cargo bay. The model
includes carriers that were mounted in the cargo bay to
carry new instruments, spacecraft components, and
astronaut tools during a servicing mission. In fact,
during these missions, this room was fully staffed 24 hours a
day, as engineers prepared Hubble for the installation of
new hardware. 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. In another section
of the exhibit hallway, these cases hold additional astronaut
tools. The middle case contains tools used to repair the
Advanced Camera for Surveys, a workhorse camera whose power
supply failed after almost five years of service. To fix the
instrument, astronauts had to first use this grid cutter to
slice through a metal grid that blocked a cover. That cover had
to be removed to get to circuit boards underneath it. The tool
contains 12 individual cutter blades on the back that sheared
through the metal grid when the front bolts were turned. The
astronauts then used the Fastener Capture Plate, a tool
that prevented 32 small screws that were holding that cover on
the instrument from floating away when they were taken out.
Next, astronauts used a card extractor to remove four circuit
boards that were under that cover. One of those circuit
boards is located in the next display case to the right. The
overall repair was successful and the instrument has now been
functioning longer than it did before its initial failure. The
built-in display case on the wall has parts of the first
spectrograph that flew on Hubble – the Goddard High Resolution
Spectrograph. It flew in space for 7 years. It was designed to
measure the intensity of light at different wavelengths to
reveal information about an object’s properties. The
spectrograph used gratings, which act like prisms to break
the light into a rainbow. Special detectors then captured
the spectral data from the rainbow of light produced by the
gratings. The other half of the built-in display case contains
more awards received by the Hubble mission as well as
various Hubble mementos, including US flags and
spacecraft insulation that flew in space. On the far wall is a
copy of one of the blueprints of the Hubble Space Telescope that
was made in 1981 when Hubble was being built. We hope you have
enjoyed this tour of the Hubble Space Telescope Control Center.
To find out more about Hubble or its operations, explore our
website at nasa.gov/hubble or follow us on social media
@NASAHubble. [music fades out]