Hubble repair mission launch at 2:00 EDT today (May 11th)........
 

TV feed.......

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv

Audio is really cool. They're putting the astronauts in as we speak.....

http://www.nasa.gov/178952main_Mission_Audio_UP.asx

yayyyy space flights!

get us off this single fragile lil rock before we destroy ourselves or get destroyed by the universe

These are always fun to watch.

10 minutes to launch. Hopefully all goes well.

Did they get Wolowitz's toilet fixed?

Yeah, that was last mission.

I know that it was added for safety reasons, but that new camera on the external fuel tank that watches to make sure the foam doesn't fly off the vehicle provides some fabulous views of Earth. Incredible to watch the view as they go from ground level to 56 miles above Earth in 3 minutes.

I sure hope so...we don't need crap hitting the fan.

Does anyone else's heart skip a beat at 2:18 of the featured launch video?? Maybe I haven't watched enough of these launches to know to expect this...

I haven't watched the replay, but I'm assuming you're talking the Solid Rocket Booster Separation (SRS). If so, it happens pretty often. :D

Yep, that's what I was referring to.. :eek:

The shuttle is about 50 miles from Hubble now and closing. They expect to link up to it relatively soon. It'll be interesting to see how beat up the telescope exterior is given the increase of space junk in its orbit. You can watch the proceedings 350,000 feet above Egypt live on NASA TV.

http://www.nasa.gov/

You might wanna fix that link, adding a space before the ).

I gotta say I have been doing some reading about this mission, and the work that is going to be done would be frustratingly difficult in my house let alone in the vacuum of space.

It will be amazing if he can do all the repairs and upgrades without anything going wrong. I like doing computer upgrades and stuff, but dealing with 135 or so tiny screws in a suit that I don't want any holes in sounds terrible. Let alone losing screws in space, or changing pc boards.

They've been chatting about the navigation system. They're using a system called a 'star tracker'. The shuttle normally uses it by focusing on a star to point them in the right direction. In this case, the system sees the reflection off the telescope as a 'star' and uses that to help with navigation.

Cool picture of the shuttle against the sun:

hxxp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6292923.ece