TOEIC(R) Test 満点続出の謎を解く!
No.293 SIM音読用英文 
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Astronauts Declare Hubble Mission a NASA Victory
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The astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis
were all smiling Wednesday
as they held their first news conference from space
since equipping the Hubble telescope
with a new camera and other enhancements this week.
They had a reason for smiling.
They successfully made unprecedented repairs
to a telescope the size of a school bus
while orbiting 560 kilometers above Earth.
Astronaut John Grunsfeld says
the complexity of the Hubble mission demonstrated
the importance of having humans,
not just machines, in space.
"We showed
that you can push that technology even further.
That people can creatively solve problems in real time,
as was more than aptly demonstrated
by Mike Massimino pulling that handrail off
that was you know something
that I don't think anybody ever anticipated."
Grunsfeld was referring to a challenge
the astronauts faced
on the fourth of their five spacewalks,
when astronauts Mike Massimino and Michael Good spent hours
struggling to remove a stuck bolt
from a handrail on the telescope.
Massimino explains.
"You know, I was out there,
and just couldn't believe
that we weren't able to, I wasn't able to get that last bolt on the
handle off.
When we trained,
it was actually the easiest."
A support team on the ground
at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland
scrambled to figure out an alternative plan.
It eventually advised Massimino
to rip the handrail off
with brute force.
Despite the challenges,
the astronauts say
they left the 19-year-old telescope stronger than ever.
They expect it to continue working
for another five to ten years.
The Hubble is the first major optical telescope
to float
high above Earth's distorting atmosphere, rain clouds and light
pollution.
That unobstructed view has produced spectacular images
of far-away galaxies
and billowing towers of gas and dust
rising from clusters of stars.
Data gathered by the Hubble
has enabled astronomers to determine
the universe is about 13.7 billion years old.
The U.S. space agency considers the Hubble's work
the most significant advance in astronomy
since the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei turned his telescope
toward the stars 400 years ago.
Kate Woodsome, VOA News, Washington
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TOEIC(R) Test 満点続出の謎を解く!
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