>> JOHN: Quiet on the set! [LAUGHTER] Hubble Space
Telescope servicing mission two take 129. [SLATE CLACKS]
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
>> JOHN: Hello, I’m John Grunsfeld, NASA astronaut.
>>RUSS: Hello, I’m Russ Werneth, I was the EVA manager
for Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. >>JOHNL An
Space Telescope servicing missions. >> JOHN: An
extravehicular activity, or EVA, is a long way of saying
“spacewalk,” and I had the pleasure of doing eight
spacewalks on the Hubble Space Telescope. That’s why I’m
wearing these spacewalking gloves. >> RUSS: We noticed
that! >> JOHN: And of course, in space it’s a vacuum so I had to
wear a spacesuit so that I had oxygen to breath and these
gloves. Now the spacesuit was pressurized to about a third of
the atmosphere’s pressure from Earth, 4.2 PSI, and that means
that I was like in a balloon, and that balloon being
pressurized means it was hard to move. So, it made tools hard to
use too. >> RUSS: So, we had to consider that when we were
engineering the tools used by the astronauts, they had to be
unique tools, and that’s one of the requirements, that it work
with the suit with those gloves. >> JOHN: Yep, now in 1997 a team
of astronauts went up to the Hubble Space Telescope on the
Servicing Mission Two, and on that mission, they used the
features of the Hubble Space Telescope, things like doors
that open and close and instruments that can be removed
using the suit to pull the instruments out, but you had to
unbolt ‘em first. Now they put in two new scientific
instruments, and these are the super-duper cameras that allow
us to observe the Universe, but they needed those special tools.
>> RUSS: So, we built what we call the Pistol Grip Tool, and
you can see by the ergonomics of it that it is easy to hold,
although it does have a battery down here, doesn’t weigh
anything in space but it has some mass to it. And the
advantage of this particular tool is it has a computer chip
inside so everything the astronauts did in removing or
inserting fasteners we had recorded the number of turns,
the direction, the torque. So, we knew exactly what was used
when that fastener was put in or taken out, and that helped us in
future missions. >> JOHN: Yup, now this tool was designed so it
could be used with a gloved hand in a spacesuit, a big paddle, so
that when you pull the paddle [TOOL WHIRRS] it pulls the
trigger to run the tool. It can run counterclockwise, you can
switch it to clockwise. It runs at different speeds too, this
was really slow, and you could program the torque for the tool,
how much it turns or tightens, and all of that was very
important. But there was one characteristic of this tool
that’s, I think, really unique, it was flown for the first time
on that second servicing mission, now virtually every
mission in space uses this tool when they’re doing spacewalks.
But who designed this tool? >>RUSS: Well the primary
designer here at Goddard Space Flight Center was Paul Richards.
And Paul actually did something quite neat. He later became an
astronaut and flew on STS-102 to Space Station, and he used the
tool that he developed here on the ground that we started using
for HST and is also used by International Space Station.
>>JOHN: Yep, virtually every spacewalk carries a tool like
this. I think, one of the things that makes humans unique, and
certainly one of the things that makes it a lot of fun to work on
spacewalks is developing tools. There are other animals that use
tools, but nobody in the animal kingdom ever came up with
anything like this. Thanks for the great tool Russ.
>> RUSS: Thanks for using the great tool John!
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
[SILENCE]
>> RUSS: And we have to tell you what “EVA” means. >> JOHN: You
didn't say “EVA.” >> OFF: You gotta say it first. >> RUSS: I
didn't say it? >> JOHN: Nope. [LAUGHTER] >> RUSS: What the?
What did I say? I wasn’t listening but. >>OFF: You said
Hubble, you said Hubble EVA Manager, but- [UPBEAT MUSIC]
>>MARK: Well we thought a couple of terms that they use all the
time on Home Improvement would be the best description of what
we’ve done to the Hubble Space Telescope. And what we’ve
accomplished is that we’ve re-wired it, and we’ve added
mo-[MIC CUTS OFF]