HOUSTON — Spacewalkers’ specially designed tools couldn’t dislodge a balky bolt interfering with repairs yesterday on the Hubble Space Telescope, so they took an approach more familiar to Earth dwellers: Use brute force.
And it worked.
Atlantis astronaut Michael Massimino couldn’t remove one bolt attaching a hand rail to the outside of a scientific instrument he needed to fix. The rail had to be removed or, at least, bent out of the way.
When the expensive tools couldn’t remove the stripped-out bolt, Mission Control in Houston told Massimino to do something a little less precise: Yank it out of the way.
Engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland quickly tested the procedure on a mock-up and found that 60 pounds of pressure were needed.
The astronauts were careful to tape pieces so they wouldn’t fly away and become potential missiles, and Mission Control warned Massimino and fellow spacewalker Michael Good to watch for debris.
“This is like tying branches together in Boy Scouts,” Good said.
Since Atlantis was out of video contact, controllers in Houston could only listen as Massimino took a breath and pulled.
After a second of silence, Massimino calmly said: “Disposal bag, please.”
After nearly two hours of work on the balky bolt, the astronauts went back to the plan to bring a science instrument back from the dead — working on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, disabled by a power failure five years ago.