Hubble in the Shop

At 3:30 a.m. Thursday, 368 miles above Mexico, astronaut Steven Hawley reached out and "shook hands with an old friend," according to commander Kenneth Bowersox. Grappling delicately with the Discovery's crane, Hawley swung the 43-foot-tall Hubble Space Telescope over the shuttle's open cargo bay and gingerly lowered it onto a platform where, in four days, it will get a thorough check-up and some new components that are expected to enhance its performance. NASA calculated that the Hubble has circled the Earth 37,130 times, covering just short of 1 billion miles. Yet apart from a small hole on one of the two parabolic dishes on the telescope's antenna, which NASA said "probably resulted from a piece of orbital debris," the Hubble was said to be in fine shape. But some of the original parts, which date back to the 70's, have to go. Just before midnight tonight, Col. Mark Lee and Steve Smith will don their grease-stained space coveralls and get to work, spacewalking in the shuttle cargo bay to install two $100 million-plus instruments, each the size of a telephone booth: a near-infrared camera and a two-dimensional imaging spectrograph. The other crew, Gregory Harbaugh and Joe Tanner, goes out Friday night. On Monday, Hubble, bristling with 11 new parts and ready for the millennium, will head back into orbit.