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January 7, 2000

Servicing Mission Orbital Verification Update

HST Project Update, January 7, 2000

The Servicing Mission Orbital Verification (SMOV) period for the Hubble Space Telescope began at the moment of HST release from Shuttle Discovery at 6:03 pm EST, Dec.25, and has proceeded nominally per the plan. At this point, the spacecraft, under the control of the new 486 computer using the new gyros, is performing well in all subsystems. We are still in the Bright Earth Avoidance (BEA) period, restricted to pointing toward a region in the sky around the northern pole of HST's orbit with uncalibrated gyros to mitigate the effects of any residual contaminants that may have been left behind by the servicing mission activities. We have nonetheless successfully activated the WFPC2, and all three channels of the STIS instrument, and used them along with the old Fine Guidance Sensors to observe several external targets. These observations, along with several instrument internal measurements, have been used to verify proper operation of the detectors and to determine that they as well as the observatory optics have not been adversely affected by servicing (i.e., no instrument or telescope contamination is detected). With this determination, we are now in a position to proceed with the gyro calibration procedure over the weekend, followed by the Early Release Observations (EROs) and the onset of General Observer (GO) science starting on Monday, Jan. 10. Also, next week, we will begin the iterative process of adjusting the optics in the new FGS (FGS2R), which will take approximately a week to finish.

So far, the spacecraft and instruments are operating nominally. While GO science will, starting next week, be scheduled at close to normal levels, SMOV calibrations will continue for several more weeks, in particular the activities for commissioning FGS2R for guiding and verifying its long-term