caused yet another delay in the rollout of Atlantis to the launch pad.
Even more delays followed when
Lockheed Martin had problems with
manufacturing delays on the External Tanks relating to enhancements
imposed by the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board which made it
hard for them to produce two External Tanks, one required for Atlantis
and another required for STS-400 Endeavour, the Hubble rescue mission.
Once these issued had been
worked out though, it looked likely
that all was set for STS-125 and a return to the Hubble Space Telescope,
but an issue on Hubble itself rather
than on the ground this time put
paid to that. On September 27, 2008
aboard Hubble, the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling
(SIC&DH) Unit on the Hubble Space
Telescope failed. The unit is essential
for Hubble as it keeps all science
instrument systems aboard the telescope synchronized to process, format and temporarily store information on the data recorders or transmit
science and engineering data to the
ground. Without this working Hubble
was unable to return data to the
earth so mission planners decided
yet again to delay the launch of STS125.
On October 30, 2008, NASA announced that they had decided to
remove Atlantis from its SRBs and ET
stack and send it back yet again to
the OPF to await a new targeted
launch time which was then slated
to be at at 1:11 p.m. EDT on May 12,
2009. On April 24, 2009, NASA managers issued