Show of strength
Rice professor applies elbow grease to free Hubble handrail

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

They brought the tools, the parts and the smarts. It’s a good thing Mike Massimino brought the muscle.

	IMAGES COURTESY OF NASA
	Mission Specialist Mike Massimino, Rice adjunct professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, looks through a window on the flight deck of the Earth-orbiting space shuttle Atlantis.

Hours into his second spacewalk of the shuttle Atlantis’ mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, the Rice adjunct professor in mechanical engineering and materials science (MEMS) resorted to brute strength to fix a problem that threatened to scuttle a main objective — reviving the telescope’s two-dimensional spectroscopy capability.

A handrail on the Hubble had to come off to give the astronaut and his spacewalking partner, Michael Good, access to the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which had not worked since its power supply failed in 2004. Four screws held the handrail on, and the first three came out easily. But Massimino’s power tool couldn’t bite into the stripped screw head of the fourth, and after several hours of trying to finesse the problem, there were only two possible solutions: give up or break it off.

Three hours into the spacewalk, the decision was made to opt for the latter. Following steps developed on the fly at the Goddard Spaceflight Center, Massimino wrestled the handrail from the Hubble — just after it entered a gap in its live video feed. One earthbound Hubble user, Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times later, “We always joke that they wait until they are out of TV view to use the hammers and crowbars. I guess they really do!”

“Unfortunately, sometimes when you’re out of graceful options, you just have to clip the thing off, or rip it off,” said Andrew Meade, Rice professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering, who attended the May 11 launch with Enrique Barrera, professor and chair of MEMS. “That sounds like a workable solution, all right.”

Mission specialists Michael Good, left, and Mike Massimino work to refurbish and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

Atlantis is scheduled to land May 23, ending what NASA acknowledged was one of the most perilous shuttle missions to date, not only because of its complexity but also because the shuttle, if damaged, wouldn’t be able to reach safe harbor at the international space station. (A second shuttle stood by to launch if a rescue was required.) The successful endeavor extended Hubble’s useful life by at least five years while greatly expanding scientists’ capability to explore the universe.

Massimino, who took two of the mission’s five spacewalks in his second and final visit to Hubble, plans to return to Rice with the MEMS T-shirt he brought aloft, signed by all those who attended his most recent lecture at Rice.