Description

STS 82 was the 22nd flight of the Discovery orbiter, the 82nd shuttle mission, and the 16th night launch of the shuttle. Its objective was to repair, replace, and/or update the instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. During several days of EVA, the crew replaced a failed Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), swapped one of the reel-to-reel tape recorders with a solid-state recorder, and exchanged two of the original instruments, the Goddard High-Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) and the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), with two new instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). In addition to this planned work, astronauts discovered that some of the insulation around the light shield portion of the telescope had degraded and attached several thermal insulation blankets to correct the problem. The duration of the mission was 9 days, 23 hours, 38 minutes, and 9 seconds and lasted for 149 orbits.