Batteries that powered Hubble Space Telescope return to Joplin, where they were built

Jul. 9—At first glance it doesn't look like much — a black-shrouded module tipping the scales at 400 pounds.

But the three nickel hydrogen batteries housed inside have been on a long journey, powering the Hubble Space Telescope as it orbited 340 miles above Earth.

"This is not your typical car battery," said a grinning Kevin Ames, the director of quality assurance at EaglePicher, who helped build and test the Hubble batteries.

Following a 2009 service mission to the $1.5 billion space telescope by the Space Shuttle Atlantis — in which six of the company's 28-volt original batteries were swapped out with new ones — the used batteries made their way back home to Joplin, where they were originally built.

Soon, they will be on public display inside the company's Davis Boulevard plant, sitting alongside batteries that helped power the International Space Station, as well the famous Apollo 13 silver-zinc batteries that helped bring three astronauts safely home from the moon after an accident with the fuel cells on that mission.

EaglePicher actually has six batteries from the Hubble back, three each in two separate modules, that powered the space telescope for nearly two decades.

"Those units were in space — from 1990 to 2009 — for 19 years," said Scott Cogdill, quality assurance manager over the company's aerospace group. "That just blows my mind."

The battery life was projected by NASA to last 5 years; the original batteries exceeded that by 14 years.

When those batteries were brought down from orbit and analyzed, the percentage of battery decay, or overall drain, was less than 5%, said Bob Baker, program manager for EaglePicher.

"We didn't get to monitor the voltage but our customer did, and they said we had above 95% (charge) after 19 years on orbit when they pulled those batteries out," he said. This means the new set of batteries now powering Hubble should easily keep it powered through its expected end of mission set for somewhere between 2030 and 2040.

Because the (original) batteries worked so well, Cogdill said it was simply a matter staying with the tried-and-true "if it's not broke, don't fix it" principle.

"We built a set of replacement batteries well in advance but the customer decided not to use those," he said with a shrug. Numerous Hubble components were replaced during shuttle missions in 1997, 1999 and 2002. The original EaglePicher's batteries, however, weren't on any of those manifests.

Ames remembers the moment that Hubble, freshly launched from the Shuttle's cargo bay, first came to life in April 1990. He admitted there were butterflies among the entire EaglePicher team. Would the batteries work as planned? Would Hubble come to life right before their eyes?

When Hubble went green, Ames said, "It was like, 'Ah!' — we all felt that (elation), because we were all part of the (Hubble) team."

"It was pretty cool," Baker said with a grin.

"We were through the roof," added test equipment technician Russell Fleetwood.

And if Hubble hadn't powered up?

"We were ready to run away from home," Fleetwood quipped.

The four men — Ames, Cogdill, Fleetwood and Baker — represent more than 150 years of combined battery building know-how.

Replacing batteries on the space telescope, which is the the size of a school bus, required additional testing because the nickel-hydrogen batteries had to be rated for a crewed mission, because they were transported on the shuttle. This technology is old-hat in 2022 but back in 1990 it was cutting-edge.

"We had been building nickel-hydrogen cells, but not much batteries," Ames said. "This was definitely the first (space) mission" using this type of electrochemical power battery. "Before that, it had all been telecommunication satellites."

"This was the first mission that had to go through the requirements of manned flight" using nickel-hydrogen batteries, added Baker, "which means you take the regular requirements — and then quadruple them."

"I've always told people that (on the Hubble job), we went from a blank sheet of paper to launch in 18 months," Cogdill said.

"It was seven days a week, 24 hours a day," Baker added.

Said Ames: "One fourth of every EaglePicher employees was involved in the Hubble batteries, from start to finish."

"We learned a lot of things that we thought we already knew," said Cogdill, "like high-reliability solder — we had to learn to solder to specifications. 'Bigger glob better the job' didn't work here. We had to go through training, learn all that? How do we do it? How do we inspect it? ... The government — our customer — followed right along behind me to say, 'Yep, that's good.'"

When the batteries were completed, and following "a few hundred thousand charge/discharge cycles," the two Hubble battery modules were carefully loaded onto a refrigerated tractor-trailer truck for a road trip to Huntsville, Alabama. A special husband/wife driving team were tasked with transporting the batteries, surrounded by lead cars and safe cars.

Once the batteries were loaded into Hubble, and space telescope itself rested inside the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery, "for a month we conditioned and watched the behavior of the batteries," Ames said. "There were hundreds, if not thousands, of charge/discharge cycles on those batteries before they ever launched."

But once it was launched, and Hubble powered up, Ames said it represented one of the most pivotal and proud moments in the company's history.

It was definitely a historic moment for the company, Ames said, which has recorded quite a few moments ever since America first ventured into space in the late 1950s — from powering the Apollo moon landings to ensuring success for NASA's Mars missions. At this moment, EaglePicher batteries power between 300 to 400 NASA space vehicles, from probes to stations to satellites to planetary rovers. Overall, their batteries have exceeded 3 billion hours of cell operations in outer space without failures.

The Hubble's batteries continued a safety record that is second to none, Ames said.

"It's similar to when you build a battery for a (missile) — if it doesn't work, people die. It's just that simple. That's the attitude that you have to have with this kind of job (for Hubble) — it's people's lives actually do depend on (our batteries)."