Telescope From Shuttle Getting a Realignment

Scientists moved closer to resolving alignment problems Wednesday evening with an ultraviolet telescope that was released from space shuttle Columbia for two weeks of observations.

Earlier in the day, before the trouble was fully understood, scientists were “poking around in the dark” with the telescope, said NASA astrophysicist Ronald Polidan.

He expected all three instruments on the telescope to be operating normally by today. The problems cropped up after an 11-day delay in the flight.

Columbia’s five astronauts set loose the telescope Tuesday night, eight hours after the shuttle blasted off.

The telescope is supposed to fly free of Columbia more than 200 miles above Earth for nearly 14 days, making up to 300 observations of newborn and dying stars, interstellar gas, the atmosphere of the moon and the northern and southern lights of Jupiter.

Scientists discovered the alignment problems when they aimed the telescope at the brightest ultraviolet object in the sky other than the sun, a star in the constellation Puppis, 1,000 to 1,500 light-years away. The star wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

The cause of the alignment problem wasn’t immediately known, but it might have been the vibration of liftoff.

Once scientists determine the degree of misalignment, they can send corrective computer commands, Polidan said. They were able to rule out a sensitivity problem, at least, with one of the instruments, a high-resolution spectrograph, he said.

U.S. and German space agencies and universities have spent $93 million on the project.

The astronauts will use the shuttle robot arm to retrieve the telescope on Dec. 3 for the trip home two days later. They also will drop off and recapture a satellite intended to grow thin semiconductor film; that release is scheduled for Friday night.