As space-walking Atlantis shuttle astronauts fix the Hubble Space Telescope this week, they will have some South Dakota know-how looking over their shoulder.

Edgemont area native Theodore "Ted" Gull, a NASA astrophysicist, will be among a dozen scientists and engineers monitoring the work from a control room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Gull has worked there since 1977.

Atlantis and its crew of seven will rocket away from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., at noon Black Hills time today. Bound for the world-famous telescope, they are taking replacement parts for broken cameras, fresh batteries and new instruments to keep Hubble running for five to 10 years.

Hubble, launched in 1990, has required four repair visits, but the upgrades have produced eye-popping images and cosmic discoveries considered priceless. Hubble has shed light on the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) and proved the existence of super-massive black holes, among other things.

"Everybody loves Hubble now," NASA's science chief, Ed Weiler, said.

Science and sentiment explains why astronauts will attempt to revive dead instruments for equipment that was never meant to be handled in orbit.

In all, five spacewalks will be performed in as many days by two repair teams. Officials say their extraordinarily difficult job is on a par with operating-room surgery.

The Atlantis crew also faces increased danger from space junk because of Hubble's extremely high and littered orbit 350 miles up.

To protect the orbiter and its crew, Atlantis will be upside down and backward when it pulls up next to Hubble to minimize the danger of being struck by space debris or work tools and telescope parts during the repairs.

That's why the work of Gull's team is more important than it might sound on an earth-based project.

He calls his involvement "a relatively minor role this mission."

The astronauts on the fourth space walk on Sunday, May 17, will repair an instrument developed at Goddard and built with Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. in Boulder, Colo.

The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph is considered among the Hubble's more important instruments, having made the first atmospheric measurements of a planet around another star. The other is the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which quit in 2007.

The spectrograph needs a new electronic circuit card. The camera needs four, which are located around a corner and behind a strut.

Gull in an e-mail to the Journal said the electronic board controls the mechanisms within the spectrograph.

Replacing the board means "over a 100 screws must be removed … and not lost!" Gull said.

The danger is that even a small piece of debris could puncture the skin of the shuttle, crippling its ability to return to Earth.

Gull said the Goddard-Ball team designed a cover template that will attach to the spectrograph and capture each fastener as it is removed. The astronauts will then use a special tool - 116 were developed for this mission - to remove and replace the electronics board before restoring the cover.

The astronauts will work on the 44-foot-long, 12-ton telescope in the shuttle's payload bay. Gull said the school-bus-size Hubble will sit on a large turntable during repairs.

When the spectrograph is ready, the Goddard control center will begin "an aliveness test to make sure STIS is operational. Should the replacement board not work, there is a spare board, but very little time to change out the spare. Once the bay doors are closed and the astronauts [are] doing other tasks, we will do a functional test to confirm that STIS operates. By late afternoon, we should know if it is working," Gull wrote.

Continued testing, calibrating and certifying programs will run through the summer before "we will be back to normal operations," Gull said. "A summary of Hubble repairs and new science results will be presented to the public in September."

He hopes students, from recent local college graduates to elementary pupils exchanging Internet Tweets with astronaut Michael Massimino, are inspired by the mission.

There are bigger, better telescopes ahead, including European based telescopes connecting as one as a 160 meter-diameter telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2013 to observatories, some up to 26 meters wide, planned for 2025.

"That is the future for our grandchildren - to build, use and make even more exciting discoveries," Gull said. "So those graduates from SDSM&T and BHSU, and especially those grade school and high school graduates, had better be dreaming."

On the Net:

NASA: www.nasa.gov/mission-pages/hubble/main

Space Telescope Science Institute: www.stsci.edu/hst