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Servicing just means the ability to be able to fix or repair something in space.

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So, similarly to if your car breaks here on Earth or there's a problem with your air conditioner at home,

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you can fix those things and it's pretty easy to do on the ground.

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In space it's a little bit more challenging. So, you need to kind of design that ability into the hardware

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to allow astronauts to be able to fix things in space while they're wearing bulky gloves.

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The Hubble Space Telescope was specially designed

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to enable it to live longer than any other telescope or satellite.

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Engineers on the ground designed it with interfaces or pieces of hardware that can easily be accessed by an astronaut

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and fixed using kind of standard tools.

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When Hubble launched in 1990,

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unfortunately scientists discovered that when they received the first images, they looked blurry.

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With some amazing smart people on the ground,

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they realized that the primary mirror that collects all the light from the stars was slightly misshapen by just a teeny amount

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and that's what made all the scientific images look blurry.

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The first Hubble servicing mission, SM1, of which one of the primary objectives was to fix that misshapen mirror

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by launching a dedicated separate scientific instrument

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that has what you might hear, eyeglasses, on it, or special lenses.

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that could correct for this misshapen mirror

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and then sharpen up all the scientific images to make them look the way they're supposed to look.

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Hubble was unique in that the failures that we met with toward the end of the servicing missions

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forced us to design tools that had never been designed before.

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So, we ended up repairing parts of the telescope that were not planned on being repairing before we launched.

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The analogy given is doing heart surgery

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in space

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with tiny tools, tethers and techniques that we never initially designed to be used.

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We learned a lot about how to do harder things.

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You know, harder things that anyone had ever done

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during spacewalks.

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There are lots of types of missions where astronauts do spacewalks

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including Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station

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There will be future lunar missions and martian missions.

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So, they're using some of the tools and techniques that were developed by

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some of our Hubble engineers, and then similarly a lot of those lessons learned will be applied to future

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lunar spacewalks and martian spacewalks.

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Because we're going to need to be doing more specific, probably more hand intensive

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things to get future space stations set up.