January
7, 2000
Servicing
Mission Orbital Verification Update
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HST
Project Update, January 7, 2000
The Servicing Mission Orbital Verification (SMOV) period for
the Hubble Space Telescope began at the moment of HST release
from Shuttle Discovery at 6:03 pm EST, Dec.25, and has proceeded
nominally per the plan. At this point, the spacecraft, under
the control of the new 486 computer using the new gyros, is
performing well in all subsystems. We are still in the Bright
Earth Avoidance (BEA) period, restricted to pointing toward
a region in the sky around the northern pole of HST's orbit
with uncalibrated gyros to mitigate the effects of any residual
contaminants that may have been left behind by the servicing
mission activities. We have nonetheless successfully activated
the WFPC2, and all three channels of the STIS instrument,
and used them along with the old Fine Guidance Sensors to
observe several external targets. These observations, along
with several instrument internal measurements, have been used
to verify proper operation of the detectors and to determine
that they as well as the observatory optics have not been
adversely affected by servicing (i.e., no instrument or telescope
contamination is detected). With this determination, we are
now in a position to proceed with the gyro calibration procedure
over the weekend, followed by the Early Release Observations
(EROs) and the onset of General Observer (GO) science starting
on Monday, Jan. 10. Also, next week, we will begin the iterative
process of adjusting the optics in the new FGS (FGS2R), which
will take approximately a week to finish.
So far, the spacecraft and instruments are operating nominally.
While GO science will, starting next week, be scheduled at
close to normal levels, SMOV calibrations will continue for
several more weeks, in particular the activities for commissioning
FGS2R for guiding and verifying its long-term
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