Years of training didn't prepare the shuttle Atlantis astronauts for the problems encountered during NASA's final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, Reuters cited the crew as saying today. With the refurbished telescope back in orbit, the seven shuttle astronauts took some time off and began preparing for Friday's homecoming at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "It's amazing looking back at how hard things looked a couple of times -- more difficult than I ever expected -- and then to overcome and wind up with everything done in the way that it was. We were very successful," Atlantis commander Scott Altman told reporters during an in-flight news conference on Wednesday. The crew conducted five spacewalks, fraught with unexpected problems, to outfit the 19-year-old Hubble with two new science instruments, fresh batteries, six positioning gyroscopes and other gear. They also repaired two broken cameras that were never intended to be worked on in space, let alone by astronauts wearing the bulky gloves and pressurized suits needed for spacewalks. During one spacewalk, astronaut Michael Massimino literally ripped off a handrail when a single bolt prevented him from unscrewing it as planned so he could reach the telescope's broken light-splitting spectrograph for repairs. "Whoever it is down there at the Goddard Space Flight Center who figured out that we could just yank that handle off, I owe you one," Massimino said. Atlantis' flight is NASA's fifth and final servicing mission to Hubble before the shuttle fleet is retired next year.
