The space shuttle Atlantis has returned to the launching pad.

If all goes to plan it will blast off on October 8 on a mission to upgrade / repair the veteran Hubble Space Telescope, putting in new instruments, repairing existing ones and swapping new batteries for old. This will be the last ever mission to the Hubble and NASA says (slightly ambiguously) it will put in place technology that “improves

the discovery power of Hubble by 10 to 70 times”.

Those interested in this mission should also check out what is possibly the cheesiest crew photo of all time (below the fold).

Images: NASA