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,…
Batteries that powered Hubble Space Telescope return to Joplin, where they were built | Local News
