Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing team members at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will track the voyage of seven astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis beginning May 11 and vice versa.
The 11-day mission incorporates five spacewalks to service NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Liftoff is scheduled for 2:01 p.m. (EDT).
The tie-in began two years ago when three STS-125 astronauts - mission commander Scott Altman and mission specialists/spacewalkers Andrew Feustel and Mike Massimino - provided a behind-the-scenes tour of the Johnson Space Center in Houston for NHLR team members. The team hosted the astronauts and their families at the Champ Car race that weekend. NHLR senior engineer Craig Hampson has remained in contact with the crew.
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The tour included mission control, the neutral buoyancy facility and the flight simulator.
“We all proved miserable at landing the shuttle with the exception of our chief mechanic, who brought his young son of the video game generation,” Hampson said. “He put it right down on the runway no problem.”
In practice this week, the Nos. 02 and 06 cars of Graham Rahal and Robert Doornbos are carrying the mission logo at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Wrote Altman in a recent e-mail to Hampson: “Hopefully, we’ll be back in time to watch the race and root for your team.”
“It’s great that they’re finally able to go up and that it corresponds with our big month of May,” Hampson said. “As a team, we’re following it really closely and excited for them. If they had gone up earlier, there was a hope they would be able to come to the race. Hopefully, we’ll see them sometime during the year at a race.”
Astronauts will install two new instruments, repair two inactive ones and perform the component replacements that will keep the telescope functioning into at least 2014.
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“The mission is really complicated,” Hampson said, “plus trying to do it with a space suit on and gloves on and in space where every action has an equal and opposite reaction. They had to come up with a lot of unique tools and processes to fix things that were never expected to have to be fixed in space. It’s going to be a real challenge.”
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