HOUSTON - Two spacewalking astronauts from the shuttle Discovery eased two new scientific instruments into the Hubble Space Telescope yesterday, starting a four day $350 million orbital tune up.
Mark Lee and Steve Smith gently removed two of the telescope's ageing instruments and replaced them with an improved light splitting spectrograph and a multipurpose infrared camera.
It was an eventful night for the shuttle crew and ground controllers at mission control in Texas.
The start of the spacewalk was delayed when one of the telescope's solar arrays was put in a spin and there were problems closing a set of doors, but all of the work was accomplished after 6 1/2 hours.