Hubble Blog Entry # 1, May 11, 2008

Hello and welcome to the Challenger Alumni Hubble Blog! My name is Meg and I’m a member of the team of engineers helping to prepare for STS-125—the fifth and final Hubble Servicing Mission. Over the next few months, I hope to give you some insight into my job at the Goddard Space Flight Center as well as to share some general information about the mission itself.

STS-125 is scheduled to launch aboard Atlantis later this year with the aim of visiting the Hubble Space Telescope. Upon launch, Atlantis will have a payload bay full of equipment that the crew will use to complete one of the most exciting missions to date. If all goes as planned, these upgrades will help to make Hubble better than it’s ever been before.

This is where I come in. While I’m an aerospace engineer by education, my official title here at Goddard is mechanical systems engineer for the Orbital Replacement Unit Carrier (ORUC). It may sound like a mouthful, but it really just means that I help to ensure that all of the pieces of the ORUC—roughly a third of the shuttle’s payload for this mission—fit together properly and function in the way that they’ve been designed. Day to day, my job is rarely the same (which is exactly how I like it!) since I’ve been able to get involved in all phases of hardware design, development, and testing.

I hope to update this blog at least once a month with an entry talking about various aspects of my job—from all of the neat people I get to work with to the hardware I get to help prepare for flight. In the mean time, feel free to leave any comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Until then, dream big!

-Meg