NASA Says Hubble Repair Mission Is a Go

By MIKE SCHNEIDER

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – 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, 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 butt 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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AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Greenbelt, Md.

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On the Net:

Hubble Space Telescope at http://hubblesite.org