WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

With five days of service and upgrade work on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) behind them, the STS-109 crew members on board the Space Shuttle Columbia took an overall snapshot of the giant telescope in the shuttle's cargo bay. The seven-member crew completed the last of its five ambitious space walks early on March 8, 2002, with the successful installation of an experimental cooling system for Hubble’s Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The NICMOS has been dormant since January 1999 when its original coolant ran out. The telescope received new solar array panels, markedly different in appearance from the replaced pair, on the mission's first two space walks earlier in the week.