Spacewalkers' specially designed tools couldn't dislodge a balky bolt interfering with repairs Sunday at the Hubble Space Telescope. So they took an approach more familiar to people puttering around down on Earth: brute force. Atlantis astronaut Michael Massimino couldn't remove an 1.25-inch (3.2-centimeter) long bolt attaching a hand rail to the outside of a scientific instrument he needed to fix. The rail had to be removed or at least bent out of the way. NASA, which prides itself on being prepared, had not anticipated a bolt problem while removing the 1.5-foot (0.5-meter) long hand rail, said lead flight controller Tony Ceccacci. Astronomers, whose nerves were tried by the spacewalk, were still happy because it was the second straight resurrection of a much-used but dead scientific device. The marathon spacewalk by Massimino and Michael Good took so long - just more than eight hours that it was the sixth longest US spacewalk and a few minutes longer than the one Friday. Since Atlantis was out of video contact 350 miles (563 kilometers) above Earth, controllers in Houston could only listen as Massimino took a breath and pulled. After a second of silence, Massimino calmly said: “disposal bag, please.” After nearly two hours of work on the balky bolt, astronauts went back to the plan to bring the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph back from the dead. On Tuesday, Atlantis will release Hubble, which NASA hopes will keep operating for another five to 10 years, before it is steered to a watery grave.
