Astronauts snare Hubble telescope

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 3 (UPI) -- After a two-day chase around the planet, the shuttle Columbia crew closed in on the Hubble Space Telescope Sunday, finally corralling the $2 billion observatory with a gentle clasp of a crane to settle it into place for five days of servicing.

Shuttle commander Scott Altman slowly pulsed Columbia's steering jets to ease the spaceship toward the telescope early Sunday morning. Working from a command station at the rear of the flight deck, astronaut Nancy Currie maneuvered the shuttle's external 50-foot-long robot arm to latch on to the telescope as the two spacecraft soared 360 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

"Houston, we have Hubble on the arm," Altman radioed to flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston as Currie grappled the telescope at 4:31 a.m. ET.

"Outstanding work," replied astronaut Mario Runco, from Mission Control.

Currie then slowly began lowering the telescope onto a rotating work platform in Columbia's open payload bay. Work on the telescope began a few hours later, as ground controllers radioed Hubble to reposition its solar arrays and began retracting the 40-foot long, 10.8-foot wide panels. The telescope is to be outfitted with new, more powerful solar wings as part of a $172 million upgrade.

Replacing one of the arrays is among the tasks scheduled for the first of five spacewalks planned during Columbia's Hubble servicing mission. The spacewalk is expected to begin early Monday.