[Mongoose]

Pic of Atlantis and Hubble, taken from Earth

That's utterly fantastic.

Looks like the third day went almost completely without a hitch, for once.  In fact, the spacewalk went ahead of schedule and managed to get more accomplished than was originally planned.  The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is installed and operational, and it seems as though the repairs to the Advanced Camera for Surveys went according to plan.  Next up: an even more involved repair of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, including the removal of 111 itty-bitty screws from an access panel.  That'd be a ***** even down here.

(I swear, NASA has to have a few English majors on-staff to come up with proper-sounding acronyms for all of this stuff. )

[Mongoose]

In the middle of the fifth and final spacewalk right now.  The repair of the STIS yesterday was successful, but because of a handle bolt issue earlier, the spacewalkers didn't have time to replace some of Hubble's thermal covering as planned, so that had to be tacked onto the end of today's spacewalk.  It seems like they've already successfully replaced the final battery assembly and the broken Fine Guidance Sensor, so they're now working on some of that thermal covering.

All things considered, this mission seems like a resounding success so far.  The only setback I can think of is the fact that the High Resolution Channel on the ACS didn't come back online, but that was considered a long shot at best, and the Wide Field Channel that was specifically targeted by the repair seems to be working just fine now.  This mission will definitely wind up breaking just about every boundary or what sort of repairs can be pulled off in-situ.

[Rhymes]

Good, now we just have to hope that the re-entry and landing go as planned.

*crosses fingers*

[Goober5000]

Re-entering frpm the Hubble orbit isn't any different from re-entering from the ISS orbit.  They inspected the heat shield and found nothing to worry about.

The only difference between the Hubble mission and any ISS mission, from a safety standpoint, is the time crunch.  At the ISS, they can afford to take refuge on the ISS for up to two months, long enough for the next shuttle to make its way through its normal processing flow and launch at the same time as it normally would have launched for its next mission.  With the Hubble, they can only wait on the shuttle itself for up to two weeks, so the next shuttle has to have finished its processing and already be on the launch pad.