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NASA cancels servicing to Hubble

Posted on: Saturday, 17 January 2004, 06:00 CST

NASA cancels servicing to Hubble

Focus shifts to Bush's plans for moon, Mars

By PAUL RECER Associated Press

Saturday, January 17, 2004

Washington -- The Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to degrade and eventually become useless, as NASA changes focus to President Bush's plans to send humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, officials said Friday.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration canceled all space shuttle servicing missions to the Hubble, which has revolutionized the study of astronomy with its striking images of the universe.

John Grunsfeld, NASA's chief scientist, said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe made the decision to cancel the fifth space shuttle service mission to the Hubble when it became clear there was not enough time to conduct it before the shuttle is retired. The servicing mission was considered essential to enable the orbiting telescope to continue to operate.

"This is a sad day," Grunsfeld said, but he added that the decision "is the best thing for the space community."

He said the decision was influenced by Bush's new space initiative, which calls for NASA to start developing the spacecraft and equipment for voyages to the moon and later to Mars. The president's plan also called for the space shuttle to be retired by 2010. Virtually all of the shuttle's remaining flights would be used to complete construction of the International Space Station.

The shuttle has been grounded since the loss of the Columbia nearly a year ago.

Without servicing missions, he said, the Hubble should continue operating until 2007 or 2008 -- "as long as we can." NASA already was planning to replace the Hubble with a new, improved version, called the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2011.

The Hubble, the first of NASA's orbiting observatories, was launched in 1990.

It has revolutionized astronomy. Using images from the craft, scientists have determined the age of the universe, about 13.7 billion years, and discovered that a mysterious energy, called the dark force, is causing all of the objects in the universe to move apart at an accelerating rate. This force still is poorly understood.

The observatory has ailing gyroscopes that were to be replaced on the servicing mission.

The Hubble will eventually fall out of orbit and crash to Earth, probably in 2011 or 2012. To make that event safe, Grunsfeld said, NASA will design and build a small robot craft that will be launched and guided to the Hubble.

The robot craft would "grab the Hubble and bring it into the atmosphere in a controlled manner," he said, guiding the bus-sized craft to harmlessly splash into a remote part of an ocean.

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