NASA says Hubble repair mission is a go

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NASA says Hubble repair mission is a go

NASA will send a space shuttle to repair the 16-year-old Hubble Space
Telescope, agency Administrator Michael Griffin announced Tuesday, reversing
his predecessor's decision to nix the mission.

Griffin's announcement at NASA operations in Greenbelt, Md., was greeted
eagerly by astronomers who feared Hubble would deteriorate before the end of
the decade without new sensors and other upgrades.

The 11-day rehab mission, likely launching in May 2008 using space shuttle
Discovery, would keep Hubble working until about 2013. Its estimated cost is
$900 million.

The Hubble telescope has captured some of the most spectacular images of the
universe, popularizing astronomy while at the same time advancing our
understanding of space.

It has enabled direct observation of the universe as it was 12 billion years
ago, discovered black holes at the center of galaxies, provided measurements
that helped establish the size and age of the universe and offered evidence
that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

"The Hubble telescope has been the greatest telescope since Galileo invented
the first one," said U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (news, bio, voting record),
D-Md., a fierce champion of Hubble, which is managed out of Goddard Space
Center in Greenbelt. "It has gone to look at places in the universe that we
didn't know existed before."

The repair mission crew will include three veterans of the last Hubble
mission, in 2002, and four astronauts on their first space trip, Griffin
said.

Former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe canceled a Hubble repair mission
after the Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts in 2003.
O'Keefe believed the risks were too great and the remaining shuttle missions
should focus on completing construction of the international space station.

Griffin, however, said Tuesday that he was convinced the repair mission
could be done after the last three shuttle flights demonstrated astronauts'
ability to inspect the spacecraft in-flight and make difficult repairs.

"The safety of our crew conducting this mission will be as much as we can
possibly do," Griffin said. "We're not going to risk a crew in order to do a
Hubble mission."

NASA would have another shuttle on the launch pad, ready to make an
emergency rescue trip in case of trouble, but astronauts wouldn't have the
option of taking haven in the international space station.

The Hubble mission would add two new camera instruments to the telescope,
upgrade aging batteries and stabilizing equipment, add new guidance sensors
and repair a light-separating spectrograph. The repair crew includes
veterans Scott Altman, John Grunsfeld and Michael Massimino, and rookies
Greg Johnson, Andrew Feustel, Mike Good and Megan McArthur.

Hubble was launched in 1990 with a faulty primary mirror that prevented it
from focusing, and it quickly became the *** of jokes. Three years later,
astronauts repaired the telescope's blurred vision in the first of four
trips.

"The Hubble has been a roller coaster," said NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center director Ed Weiler, Hubble's chief scientist from 1979 to 1998. "It
really has."
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