Marshall Space Flight Center of the launch vehicle. Finally, on April 24, 1990, on Mission STS-31, Shuttle "Discovery" launched the Hubble telescope successfully into its planned orbit. Almost immediately it was realized that the optical performance was not as expected; analysis of the flawed images showed that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, resulting in spherical aberration. Fortunately, the Hubble telescope had been designed to allow in-space maintenance, and in December 1993, mission STS-61 carried astronauts to the Hubble to make corrections and change some components. A second repair mission, STS-82, was made in February 1997, and a third, STS-103,
Space Shuttle preserve their consumables. The SSPTS was first used successfully on STS-118. Orbiter (for "Endeavour", OV-105) External tank (for SLWT) Solid Rocket Boosters System Stack All Space Shuttle missions were launched from Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The weather criteria used for launch included, but were not limited to: precipitation, temperatures, cloud cover, lightning forecast, wind, and humidity. The Shuttle was not launched under conditions where it could have been struck by lightning. Aircraft are often struck by lightning with no adverse effects because the electricity of the strike is dissipated through its conductive structure and the aircraft is not electrically grounded.