WEBVTT FILE

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>>KATRINA: The Hubble Space Telescope, after

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over a decade of development, was finally launched on Tuesday,

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April 24th, 1990, with the Space Shuttle crew of

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STS-31. The next several days would include a lot of long, stressful hours

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for the Hubble operations team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Problems kept

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popping up, with the pressure of the entire world watching. But,

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even under pressure, engineers are capable of some pretty creative problem-solving.

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[music]

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[shimmering music] >>JOHN: The week that Hubble deployed

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was a very intense week for all of us here. >>DAVE: NASA had beat the drums

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pretty loudly for HST, so everybody was watching.

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Everybody was paying attention. [digital beeps]

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>>LARRY: Yeah on a Friday morning at about 4:30,

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we noticed that we were getting what we call "safemode counts".

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>>JOHN: There were high torques developing in the high-gain antenna that we didn't

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expect. >>LARRY: The high-gain antennas are our main

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way to communicate with the ground, to get our science data there. And we have two

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high-gain antennas, one on each side. >>DAVE: The spacecraft had noticed that

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when it tried to move one of the antennas, there was resistance, and

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the spacecraft was programmed such that if it felt continued resistance,

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it would just declare sort of a "I'm not going to go any further with this."

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>>LARRY: On Saturday, we had gotten a tiger team together and looked at the

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high torques we had seen on the high-gain antenna on Friday. About 2:00 we

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turned it back on again, tried to move it again, and immediately we saw we were still

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getting high torques on there. >>JOHN: When I walked into the building on Sunday, after

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having gotten a little bit of sleep, operations of the Hubble had

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basically stopped. >>DAVE: The managers put all of the technical people in a room

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and said, "Figure this out." Today, you would bring it up on a screen

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and you would move the thing around and you would see what's going on. But these were

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much more primitive days. >>JOHN: So I was with my hands trying to figure out what

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the various positions of the high-gain antenna motors

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were. >>DAVE: We were able to find some loose-leaf binder sort of things

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with a lot of photos of the high-gain antenna. >>JOHN: I saw this cable loop

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and it appeared to me to be at an odd position. Somewhere along the line, I

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just, I said probably half jokingly, "Boy, if I had a set of Tinkertoys,

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I could build a little model of this and show you guys what's going on."

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>>DAVE: You're sitting in a room with the highest power of people in the business,

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and you're proposing to go get a child's toy to help solve the problem.

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>>JOHN: Dave Skillman pulled me aside. He looked me straight in the face

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and he said, "Were you serious about that?" >>DAVE: I just kind of let myself out of the room

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and drove to the nearby Toys 'R' Us.

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People were asking me, "Can I help you?" and I'm going, "Not easily...

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This is not really the spacecraft aisle." >>JOHN: And about

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an hour later, he came back. And I sat down at the table,

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he sat down next to me, and I put together a

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little working model of the high-gain antenna. And then right

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away, when I moved the two gimbals to the positions that

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they had been at when the torque occurred, sure enough, this

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little Tinkertoy model of a counterweight was right

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in contact with this electrical extension cord. >>LARRY: It was amazing how it actually

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allowed us to visualize what's going on out there in space.

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>>JOHN: This area of high torque was really a relatively small piece

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of the operational area of the high-gain. As long as we stayed away from that

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obstruction, there was a whole, you know, huge range of motion of the

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antenna that we would be able to operate. >>DAVE: The model was able to convince the

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politicians and the managers that we did understand the problem.

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And then the technical guys had figured out what we needed to do to fix the problem.

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>>JOHN: 9:00 that night, Sunday night, we went into the control room,

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and the folks in command sent the commands up.

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>>LARRY: And immediately we saw those torque levels go down, when we turned it on and

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started to back it away. And we all breathed a big sigh of relief.

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We were saying, "okay, we didn't break it, we think it's still operational." If we hadn't had use

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of the high-gain, that would have been a big impact to Hubble.

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[transitioning music] >>KATRINA: With the telescope now

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fully deployed, the Hubble operations team could finally catch their breath.

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And then, a couple months later, people discovered that devastating

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problem with Hubble's flawed primary mirror, a huge blow to the project.

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But incredibly, the Hubble team worked through it and found a solution to that problem

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and to many more obstacles over the next 25 years. So, stay tuned

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for more Hubble Memorable Moments.

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[spacecraft whooshes by] [beep beep, beep beep]

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[beep beep, beep beep, beep beep]

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