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NASA Rides to Hubble's Rescue

Posted on: Wednesday, 11 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

NASA rides to Hubble's rescue

Agency will send robots to repair batteries, gyroscopes

By Dan Vergano

USA Today

NASA officials Tuesday described plans to press ahead with a robotic rescue of the aging Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble's batteries and stabilizing gyroscopes are expected to fail by 2008, and the possibility of repair has been in question for months.

Tuesday's announcement, discussed at a telephone briefing, shows that the robotic rescue of Hubble has passed a series of summer reviews at NASA.

"We believe this can be done in the next 3 1/2 years," says NASA associate administrator Al Diaz. "Six months ago, we had not considered this a viable alternative."

Contract awards for the robot mission are expected in September.

But a final review of the mission will still have to take place next summer before approval is given for a tentative launch in December 2007.

Remotely conducted repairs, possibly months long, would happen in 2008.

In January, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe canceled a shuttle mission to repair the telescope, citing astronaut risk.

But in June, after an outcry from astronomers, the public and Congress, O'Keefe gave the go-ahead to plan a robotic rescue.

Preliminary plans focus on a spacecraft blasting off, attaching to Hubble and replacing the telescope's wide-field camera and an ultraviolet-light spectrograph, plus the spacecraft's batteries and gyroscopes, using a robotic arm.

Only $300 million for the de-orbiting mission exists in NASA's budget, meaning the agency will have to scrape up funds from its other programs or ask Congress for more money to pay for the robot rescue next year.

Published cost estimates for a robotic rescue have ranged from $1 billion to $1.6 billion, but Diaz declined Tuesday to provide a mission cost.

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