William Atkins
Friday, 31 October 2008 05:27
Science -
Space
Page 2 of 3
In response to Morse's statements, Preston Burch, program manager for Hubble, said,
"Getting ourselves in a position to be ready to launch the Hubble mission will involve many steps, and a significant one took place earlier today. We held a flight certification peer review meeting where every aspect for doing this effort -- the inspections needed, all the tests to be conducted, the certification process and the final flight preparations -- was examined. The conclusion was that we indeed have a very good plan in place."
According to NASA, the spare SIC&DH will undergo testing through mid-December to identify and correct any problems with the unit.
At that point, the unit will be under an environmental assessment that includes
“electro-magnetic interference checks, vibration tests, and extended time in a thermal vacuum chamber."
The environmental check is expected to last from mid-December to early March 2009.
If all goes well with the testing, the unit will be delivered to the NASA Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida) in early April 2009.
Burch states,
“The equipment we are dealing with has a flight-proven design. The original unit on Hubble ran for more than 18 years. We have a lot of spare parts if we encounter problems, and we have most of the same test equipment that was used with the original unit. We also have a lot of experience on our Hubble electrical replica, which uses the engineering model data handling unit."
Page three talks about the anomaly onboard Hubble that occurred on September 27, along with the tentative launch date.
