May 11, 2009—Astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis will install new tools in the Hubble Space Telescope to see deeper into the universe than ever before.

© 2009 National Geographic (AP); Some images courtesy NASA

Unedited Transcription

NASA is embarking on a new mission to refurbish to the Hubble telescope.

It will take three days for Atlantis to reach the telescope, which floats over 300 nautical miles above the earth.

After arrival, the crew plans to spend five days updating Hubble, in a series of daily six to seven hour long space walks.

Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has produced breathtaking views of the cosmos.

It has shed light on the age of the universe, estimated at 13.7 billion years, and shown that the universe may be expanding quicker than ever.

It has also proved the existence of supermassive black holes.

There have been four previous missions to service Hubble.

The upcoming mission is considered by some to be the most aggressive yet, with the installation of a new Wide Field Camera, and a Cosmic Origin Spectrograph, which should give astronomers a clearer image of distant space.

SOUNDBITE: (English) Keith Walyus, Operations Manager - Hubble Servicing Mission: "We're changing out or repairing four instruments, we're doing batteries, gyros, a fine guidance censor, new outer layers on the telescope. There's a lot of activities going on and to get all that to fit, it has to be really efficient."

The seven astronauts practiced their maneuvers in a pool containing a large mock up of Hubble, at the Johnson space Center in Houston.

This gave the Astronauts a sense of what actions are necessary to remove and replace instruments, such as the current wide field camera.

On the ground in Baltimore, one man who will be watching the mission very closely is Mario Livio, who has developed numerous theories and conclusions about the universe based on images produced by the telescope.

SOUNDBITE: (English) Mario Livio, Astrophysicist - Space Telescope Science Institute: "In the case of Hubble images, however, the fact that you know that those things actually exist somewhere in the universe, I mean they did not come from somebody's imagination, they really exist out there and occasionally, they tell us a very detailed story."

And scientists hope that with the new scientific instrumentation, Hubble will be able to tell a more detailed story than ever before.

The Hubble has detected light from when the universe was still relatively new.

The updated instruments should allow astronomers to get even closer to the universes origin.

NASA is leaving nothing to chance.

Should anything go wrong and the astronauts need to be rescued, another space shuttle sits on its launch pad, ready to retrieve them.

The mission is the subject of a new National Geographic Channel special, Hubble's Final Mission, airing Thursday, May 14. Check local listings for times.