Shuttle blasts off for Hubble telescope

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 1 (UPI) -- Shuttle Columbia soared off its seaside launch pad before dawn Friday to begin a two-day trip to the Hubble Space Telescope and the start of an 11-day mission to expand the observatory's reach.

"Hubble's up there waiting for us and we're ready to go to work," shuttle commander Scott Altman told the NASA launch team shortly before the 6:22 a.m. launch.

With Altman and rookie co-pilot Duane Carey at the controls, the shuttle settled into orbit 8 1/2 minutes after liftoff. Joining the pilots on the flight deck were flight engineer Nancy Currie and astronaut John Grunsfeld, who is making his second visit to the Hubble observatory. Strapped in on the mid-deck were astronauts Richard Linnehan, James Newman and rookie flier Michael Massimino.

Over the next 46 hours, the shuttle pilots will guide Columbia toward the telescope, which is in an orbit 362 miles above Earth. During the final approach, Currie will be positioned at a work station in Columbia's crew cabin to operate the shuttle's payload bay crane, which will be used to snatch the telescope and latch it to a work platform in the shuttle's open cargo hold.

The hands-on work is to begin Monday, with the first of five planned spacewalks. Grunsfeld, Newman, Linnehan and Massimino will work in pairs on alternating nights in the vacuum of space.

The mission, NASA's first for 2002, is among the most complex and demanding attempted in the shuttle program's 108-flight history. In addition to installing a higher-resolution digital camera and reviving an infrared imager, spacewalking astronauts will attempt to replace a faulty power control unit, which was not designed to be worked on in orbit. The replacement will require a power cutoff to Hubble for the first time in its 12-year history.

The flight is NASA's fourth servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was put into orbit during a 1990 shuttle mission. NASA plans one more call to Hubble before the telescope is decommissioned in 2010. NASA is working on a replacement for Hubble, called the Next Generation Space Telescope.

"There is truly nothing that compares to Hubble," said NASA's space sciences chief Ed Weiler, who watched the Friday's launch at the Kennedy Space Center.