Gallery: Don’t drop it! Inside an astronaut’s tool bag
REPAIR or replace? In these frugal times, you would think the answer would always be a resounding repair. But surprisingly, until the final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope last May, any instrument that failed on board was simply replaced. When two essential imaging instruments stopped working in the period running up to the mission, however, the crew decided a more sustainable approach was needed.
This was no easy task. “We know how to replace instruments and electrical connectors but we had never attempted to go inside the guts of an instrument and fix it in space,” says Michael Weiss, deputy programme manager for Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Repairing such complex equipment is usually done on a sterile bench inside a laboratory cleaner than an operating theatre, with each step taken painstakingly precisely – not something easily done in a pressurised spacesuit.
It required a completely new set of tools to be built for the job, which had to be easy for the astronauts to use, electrically neutral, and able to prevent the screws and bolts from floating off into space as soon as they were loosened.
The image above shows one of these bespoke tools. This washer extraction tool was used to remove washers from the outer casing of one of the failed instruments so the crew could access its circuitry. By threading them onto its long aluminium needle, the washers ...