CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Spacewalking astronauts gave the Hubble Space Telescope a better view of the cosmos by installing a new high-tech instrument today. Then they pulled off their toughest job yet: fixing a broken camera.
It was the third spacewalk in as many days for the shuttle Atlantis crew, and it had been expected to be the most challenging ever performed because of the unprecedented camera repairs.
Astronauts had never before tried to take apart a science instrument at the 19-year-old observatory.
Hubble's chief mechanic, John Grunsfeld, deftly opened up the burned-out camera and plucked out all four electronic cards that needed to be replaced.
To NASA's surprise, the new cards and power supply pack went in just as smoothly, seeming to take almost no time at all as the astronauts worked in an orbit more than 560 kilometres above the Earth.
Earlier, Grunsfeld and his spacewalking partner, Andrew Feustel, accomplished their first chore, hooking up the $88-million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph designed to detect faint light from faraway quasars.
