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CNN Live Saturday

Shuttle Continues Despite Complications

Aired March 02, 2002 - 22:48   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: Today NASA officials say the seven astronauts on board the Space Shuttle Columbia will continue on as planned, even though a faulty cooling system had threatened to scrap the mission. Their destination? The Hubble Space Telescope.

CNN's Miles O'Brien has more on the work to be done.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You're looking at Hubble Mission Control. Astronomers here have borne witness to a 24 by 7 stream of cosmological revelation for about a decade now. Amazing, isn't it? Launched with a flawed mirror and myopic vision, at first, Hubble didn't just rhyme with trouble, it embodied it in epic proportions.

Astronomer Ed Weiler was there for it all, including the day in December of '93, when the first 20/20 image appeared on the screens.

ED WEILER, NASA SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION: We knew we had redemption from going from a national joke that the night time TV hosts were, you know, using us, to we did it. We fixed it. And then the rest is history. We went from a national disgrace in some people's minds to a symbol of the great American comeback.

O'BRIEN: Hubble came back to prove black holes existed and found them all over the place. It found hints of solar systems like our own. And it showed us how the universe looked 10 billion years ago, when galaxies were toddlers.

WEILER: If Hubble is seeing the seven or six-year-old kids, the new camera will get us back to three or two-year-olds.

O'BRIEN: That new camera, the main reason for this trip, will be 10 times stronger than the one it replaces. Seven astronauts, the fourth crew to service Hubble, will be there for a week, ticking off a long to do list of telescope improvements during five, arduous space walks.

SCOTT ALTMAN, SHUTTLE COLUMBIA COMMANDER: It's an incredibly challenging mission, and yet one with an incredible reward, as we look at Hubble and extending its reach.

O'BRIEN: Not to mention it's death. (on camera): Every Hubble image ever beamed back to earth is here in this room. It used to be they were stored on this disks this size in machines which filled up the room. Today, the disks are a lot smaller, as you might suspect, and so are the machines.

But don't let the size fool you. Inside here is 7.5 terabytes of Hubble data. To put that in some perspective, the entire Library of Congress consists of 10 terabytes.

MARK POSTMAN, HUBBLE DATA PROCESSING CHIEF: The sum total of all the data we have is pretty impressive.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): But wait, there's more. Hubble's successor, the so-called next generation telescope, will orbit much farther from earth and use infrared cameras to capture the universe at the beginning. That's eight years away, but don't count Hubble out even then.

WEILER: Because Hubble is so powerful, there's a lot of science buried in those observations.

O'BRIEN: Even when Hubble is gone, it most certainly will not be forgotten.

Miles O'Brien, CNN, Baltimore.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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