Elated Astronauts Repair Telescope Aiming Device

Elated astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger announced Friday that they had repaired a $60-million telescope aiming device, a key research instrument that will be used to study Halley’s comet next year.

Astronaut Loren W. Acton fed a new set of instructions into the device, called the Instrument Pointing System, and it began tracking targets on the sun.

“Hey, it was successful!” Acton said, with some astonishment.

May Extend Mission

Because of the welcome news, flight planners considered extending the mission by a day to increase the scientific harvest. Mission scientist Eugene Urban said that the decision on whether to extend the mission depended largely on the Challenger’s supply of hydrogen and oxygen for its generators.

“If it continues to climb, we may see ourselves with another day,” Urban said. The mission is now scheduled to end Monday with a landing at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. A decision on an extension is expected by Sunday.

The astronauts, who narrowly averted an emergency landing Monday when one engine shut down minutes after liftoff, have fed new instructions into the telescope pointing system several times, hoping to correct a flaw in the device’s computer.

“Well, I’ll be darned! It’s doing its job,” astronaut-astronomer Karl Henize said after watching the pointing device lock three solar telescopes precisely on target.

A fourth solar instrument still is broken, but attempts were being made to fix it also. It is the only one of the 13 scientific instruments on the shuttle that is not working.

Solar Filament Observed

Using the pointing device, the telescopes locked onto a massive solar filament that erupted from the edge of the sun and lashed out into space. Scientists said that the filament, solar material lifted violently from the sun by a magnetic field, streamed outward for “tens of thousands of miles.”

Even before fixing the device, Henize and Acton reported one of the most successful solar studies yet. They used information from one of the telescopes to focus on sunspots, which are precursors to large solar flares, the massive nuclear explosions on the sun’s surface that send out bursts of radiation. Solar flares can affect weather, radio signals and electrical power transmission on Earth.

“Hot dog, we’re off to a good run,” said Acton, who is a solar physicist. “For the first time, we got a solar pass in its entirety.”