Woohooo!!! Hurray for more spectacular shots of space. I was so mad when they decided to cancel the last mission, but somebody's seen the wisdom of repairing this most awesome piece of space tech.
NASA to Send Shuttle to Repair Hubble in 2008
By Marc Kaufman
washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 31, 2006; 11:26 AM
NASA has decided to send a rescue and servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in May, 2008 -- an announcement that was met with an explosion of joy at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
The 11-day mission by the space shuttle Discovery will keep the popular orbiting telescope operating for years and will even increase its capacity to see deeply into the galaxies and to explore the mysteries of dark energy and intergalactic gases.
The announcement marked a turnaround from NASA's widely criticized 2004 decision to cancel the scheduled fourth and final Hubble mission. That cancellation was made in the aftermath of the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster.
Following months of internal analysis of the safety and engineering challenges posed by a fifth Hubble mission, NASA Administrator Michael T. Griffin said that he had concluded a shuttle could go to the telescope without unacceptable risk.
The seven-astronaut shuttle team will need four or five space walks to complete its work, which is designed to allow the 16-year-old Hubble to continue sending back dramatic images until a replacement telescope is launched in 2013.
NASA's concern about Hubble flight was based on a number of constraints. Among them is that the space shuttle fleet is aging fast and that NASA is eager to finish assembly of the space station by 2010, so the three remaining spacecraft can be retired. Some saw a mission to Hubble as interfering with that schedule.
After two fatal shuttle disasters, NASA is also increasingly focused on safety and on having backup systems for crews if their spaceship gets damaged. In theory, the international space station is the standby shelter for a spacecraft in trouble, but it would be unreachable on a flight to the Hubble. That is because the orbits of Hubble and the space station are very different, and a shuttle launched to the Hubble would not have the fuel and power to shift orbits to reach the station.
As a result, the crew of a Hubble-bound shuttle has only about three weeks' time to repair any damage to the spaceship. That would hardly leave time for the final contingency, preparing and launching a second shuttle for a rescue mission.
Speaking this morning at Goddard, Griffin said that the past three successful shuttle flights have convinced him that NASA now knows much better how to deal with any possible damage the shuttle might receive during launch. Any damaged incurred, he said "could, should and ought to be repairable" in space.
As a back-up, NASA will have another shuttle poised at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad in case of an emergency.
"While there is an inherent risk in all spaceflight activities, the desire to preserve a truly international asset like the Hubble Space Telescope makes doing this mission the right course of action," Griffin said.
The Hubble, which has been repaired and upgraded four times by astronauts since it was launched in 1990, has had a remarkable record of scientific breakthroughs and has greatly popularized astronomy with its stunning and awe-inspiring images of the universe.
Because it orbits 380 miles above Earth, away from the haze of the atmosphere, it can identify and photograph distant galaxies and matter never before examined. Astronomers have used Hubble images to fix the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, to discover massive black holes at the center of many galaxies, and to explore a mysterious force called dark energy, which, by acting against the forces of gravity, is causing the universe to expand.
The new mission to Hubble would include adding two powerful instruments, costing $200 million, that would greatly increase the telescope's ability to look deep into space and to study the chemical composition of the far-distant gas between galaxies.
Mario Livio, head of the science program at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages the Hubble's scheduling and research for NASA, has said the power of the new Wide Field Camera 3 would, for instance, enable astronomers to learn about even earlier phases of the universe's formation by making observations in the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. The new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will examine the subatomic baryon particles that inhabit the space between galaxies.
The instruments may have no other use if they cannot be delivered to the Hubble, Livio said.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a staunch advocate for the Hubble, told the Goddard audience that the telescope was the greatest "since Galileo invented the first one." She said that that she would work hard in the Senate to get the extra $1 billion funding to make up for the money used by NASA to upgrade the shuttles following the Columbia disaster.
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap." - Kurt Vonnegut
"Now if you remember all great paintings have an element of tragedy to them. Uh, for instance if you remember from last week, the unicorn was stuck on the aircraft carrier and couldn't get off. That was very sad. " - Kids in the Hall
