Repairing the Hubble

This hour, On Point: The amazing nitty gritty of repairing Hubble.

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Guests:

Joe Tanner joins us from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A former astronaut, he flew to the Hubble Space Telescope in February 1997 and performed two spacewalks to do repair and upgrade work on the telescope. He has gone into space four times aboard the space shuttles Atlantis, Endeavour and Discovery, and has done a total of six spacewalks. He retired from NASA in 2008 and now teaches engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Louis Friedman joins us from Pasadena, California. He is co-founder and executive director of the Planetary Society. From 1970 to 1980, he was involved in planning deep space missions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His projects included, Mariner-Venus-Mercury, Voyager, Venus Orbital Imaging Radar (Magellan), Halley Comet Rendezvous-Solar Sail and the Mars Program. He is the author of "Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Flight."

Traci Watson, NASA reporter for USA Today.

Dava Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. She's principal engineer and designer of an advanced spacesuit concept called the BioSuit, which is being designed for future trips to the Moon and Mars.

More links:

See NASA's official page for the Hubble servicing mission.  Also worth a visit is its main Hubble page,  which has sections on Hubble science, Hubble history, and loads of multimedia.