Last outer space repair of Hubble telescope pairs genius of two South Bay women

More than 300 miles above the Earth, Megan McArthur will extend a robotic arm next week and grapple the ailing Hubble Space Telescope toward space shuttle Atlantis.
The astronaut, who first dreamed of spaceflight as a teenager growing up in Silicon Valley, has replayed the precise maneuver again and again as she prepares for Monday's 11:01 a.m. launch.
"If you don't get that right," she said of the delicate capture, "you don't do anything else on the flight."
If not for University of California-Santa Cruz astronomer Sandra Faber, McArthur might never have gotten to set out on the mission to repair one of the most important astronomical instruments in history.
The rookie astronaut and the prominent astronomer have never met, but the two women from the South Bay are central characters in the long struggle to repair and upgrade one last time the famous space telescope, much of which was built in Silicon Valley.
With the shuttle fleet scheduled to be retired next year, this will be the fifth and final repair mission to Hubble. If successful, it will extend the telescope's operational life forward to 2014 and add two new instruments that will allow Faber and other astronomers to peer back toward the beginning of time.
Faber helped make it possible to repair the space telescope — twice. With one of her former Santa Cruz students, Jon Holtzman, it was Faber who first realized that Hubble was launched in 1990 with a profounderror in the shape of its main mirror, leading to the first repair mission in 1993.
After the Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA halted plans for a last repair mission to Hubble. The agency feared that a shuttle launched to the telescope would be unable to take refuge at the space station if the thermal tile damage that doomed Columbia were to happen again.
Faber was a key figure in the National Academy of Sciences panel that pushed NASA to undertake this final repair mission. In an unprecedented move, the shuttle Endeavour is waiting on the launch pad if a rescue mission becomes necessary.
The seven Atlantis astronauts are confident about that backup plan.
"They know they can come and get us" if the tiles on Atlantis are damaged, McArthur said. "That's something we've trained for and talked about — all the EVAs that would take place" for astronauts to spacewalk from Atlantis to the rescue shuttle.
Mysteries
The 11-day Hubble mission will feature five difficult spacewalks, with the astronauts replacing the telescope's gyroscopes and batteries, and repairing two existing instruments. They also will install two new instruments — the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.
Hubble has set the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years and discovered that virtually all galaxies have black holes at their center. It also helped find evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, due to a mysterious force astronomers call "dark energy."
"You might say that Galileo's telescope was more productive, being the first view of the universe," Faber said. "But I would say that after Galileo's tiny little telescope, yeah, Hubble is right there."
Still, Faber and other astronomers around the world are salivating at the cosmological mysteries Hubble's new instruments could solve — if Atlantis is successful. The major difficulty:
The spacewalkers must replace components not designed to be changed in space. link...