Countdown begins for shuttle launch to Hubble

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Countdown clocks at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida began ticking toward Monday's launch of shuttle Atlantis on a final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope, officials said on Friday.

"Hello Florida, it's great to be here -- at last," shuttle commander Scott Altman told reporters shortly after he and his crew arrived at the spaceport late Friday afternoon. "It's been a long road to get here. We're all thrilled."

Altman, pilot Greg Johnson, flight engineer Megan McArthur and spacewalkers John Grunsfeld, Michael Massimino, Michael Good and Andrew Feustel are due to spend 11 days in orbit to repair two of Hubble's science instruments, install a new imager and a new light-splitting spectrograph and replace Hubble's gyroscopes, batteries and a computer, among other tasks.

"We're ready to give Hubble a hug," Grunsfeld said.

Launched in 1990, Hubble is a joint NASA and European Space Agency project that has been key to determining that the universe is expanding at an increasingly faster rate, that black holes inhabit the centers of most galaxies and that planets are born from dusty disks surrounding stars.

The telescope also made the first measurements of chemicals in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system.

As NASA prepared for Atlantis' launch at 2:01 p.m. EDT (1801 GMT) Monday, an independent review board headed by former Lockheed Martin Chairman Norm Augustine began organizing an assessment of the U.S. human spaceflight program for President Barack Obama.

"We're going to take a fresh look, and go where the facts are, and basically call it the way we see it," Augustine told reporters during a conference call on Friday.