Barely visible within the Hubble Space Telescope's heavily shadowed shroud doors, astronauts John M. Grunsfeld (left) and Richard M. Linnehan participate in the final space walk of the STS-109 mission. The crew of the space shuttle Columbia completed the last of its five ambitious space walks early on March 8, 2002, with the successful installation of an experimental cooling system for Hubble’s Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The NICMOS has been dormant since January 1999 when its original coolant ran out. Grunsfeld and Linnehan were on their third spacewalk of the mission. Linnehan was given a ride on the shuttle’s robotic arm to the aft shroud doors by astronaut Nancy J. Currie, working from the aft flight deck of Columbia. After the shroud doors were open, Linnehan was moved back to Columbia’s payload bay to remove the NICMOS cryocooler from its carrier. Grunsfeld and Linnehan then installed the cryocooler inside the aft shroud and connected cables from its Electronics Support Module (ESM). That module had been installed on March 7 during a spacewalk by James H. Newman and Michael J. Massimino.
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.flickr.com/people/144614754@N02">NASA Hubble Space Telescope</a>
Taken on 8 March 2002
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahubble/27990746886/">Astronauts John M. Grunsfeld and Richard M. Linnehan EVA</a>