Hubble repair mission
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.030895
On this day in 1997 Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to repair and refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. A previous servicing mission, STS-61, had installed corrective optics to compensate for the telescope’s misshapen primary mirror. The second mission of 1997, STS-82, replaced the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph and the Faint Object Spectrograph with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. The STS-82 astronauts also replaced a tape recorder with a solid-state recorder. Discovery revisited Hubble two years later to replace all six of the spacecraft’s gyroscopes.
Date in History: 11 February 1997
