Space Telescope Opens Its Eye but Spooks Handlers

The Hubble Space Telescope opened its eye to the heavens for the first time Friday, but the $1.5-billion instrument continued to bedevil ground controllers with a myriad of problems.

Troubles with the balky instrument are expected to delay turning the camera on for several days, so the first picture may not be available until the latter part of next week.

Most of the problems encountered Friday stemmed from the fact that the telescope is designed to take care of itself if anything fails. If any one of scores of sensors on board the complex telescope records anything beyond expectations, the telescope is designed to assume a “safe” mode.

When that happens, the telescope does whatever is necessary to make sure that its aperture remains pointed away from the sun so that accidental exposure to the brilliance of sunlight will not damage its instruments. It also automatically orients itself to keep its solar panels exposed to the sun so that its batteries will remain charged.

“We had to build in enough autonomy so that it can be master of its own destiny,” said Steve Terry, an orbital verification director at the Goddard Space Flight Center here.

And Friday, it appeared that the Hubble, designed to look farther into the universe than any other telescope, did not like much of what it was seeing.

The telescope shut itself down several times because sensors reported that something was amiss, leaving flight controllers in the dark repeatedly as to where it was pointing and what it was doing.

Communications were out for much of the time, partly because the telescope was not pointing where controllers thought it was, and some of the gyroscopes that maneuver the instrument shut down because they sensed it was moving too quickly.

Engineers here were a bit ruffled by the many problems, but they insisted that it is better to be safe than sorry.

“We’re cautious,” admitted Terry. “We’ve got a very expensive spacecraft and we don’t want to do anything to jeopardize it.”

Controllers also want the telescope to assume various “safe modes” if anything goes wrong so that they will know just what it is doing and where it is pointing, because communication is dependent on knowing the orientation of the spacecraft.

“We don’t want the telescope to just wander off and point blindly in space where we could never use it again,” Terry said.

Engineers did get some very good news Friday, however, when the 10-foot-wide “aperture door”--NASA-speak for a lens cap--opened on command and allowed the first light from space to strike the telescope’s near-perfect mirror.

That allowed the custodians of the telescope to finally release the space shuttle Discovery, which has been shadowing the Hubble in case the door had failed to open.

If the door had remained closed, the Discovery would have closed the 50 miles that separated it from the telescope and astronauts Bruce McCandless, 52, and Kathryn D. Sullivan, 38, would have gone outside and cranked it open.

But with the door safely open, the Discovery was released and Sunday morning commander Loren J. Shriver, 45, and pilot Charles F. Bolden, 43, will guide it down to a 6:49 a.m. landing at Edwards Air Force Base. There is, however, a slight chance that weather at Edwards could delay the landing until Monday.

The fifth member of the crew is Steven Hawley, 38, an astronomer who lifted the telescope out of the Discovery’s cargo bay and set it free Wednesday.