There will be no more servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has announced, leaving one of the agency's most spectacularly successful projects to die a slow death.
The decision, announced late on Friday, is the first serious fallout from President George W Bush's new plan for the US space program. One part of this is to scrap the space shuttle fleet in 2010.
The other key factor which ended astronomers' hope of a Hubble upgrade was the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. These require that all future shuttle missions must either be within reach of the International Space Station, to provide a safe haven in an emergency, or be able to fix any damage to its insulating tiles and carbon-composite panels in orbit. It was a hole in one of the panels that caused the disintegration of Columbia during its re-entry from orbit.
The Hubble servicing mission that was scheduled for 2006 was the only shuttle mission planned not going to the ISS. NASA would therefore have had to go to the trouble and expense of developing the repair capability for just a single mission. They have now decided that does not make sense under current budget constraints.
The servicing mission was supposed to deliver new batteries and gyroscopes, considered crucial to the telescope's survival. Without them, the telescope is only given a 50 per cent chance of surviving until 2007, which is still three years shy of its expected retirement. The telescope is already down to four operational gyros out of a complement of six, and at least three are required for its ability to point at its targets.
But even more devastating to astronomers will be the loss of two new instruments that were to be installed during the service mission: a new wide-field camera and a spectrograph designed to probe the Universe's deepest regions.
New instruments added to the telescope in past missions "were so much superior to the older instruments that the results coming from these contained lots of new information," says Imke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has used the Hubble.
The existing wide-field camera is "superb," she told New Scientist. "But the new wide field camera has a larger field of view, and goes to shorter and longer wavelengths. I expect that this camera would have been in high demand."
The second lost instrument is the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which would particularly probe ultraviolet wavelengths. UV observations, which have provided important new insights into processes such as planet formation, are impossible from telescopes on Earth.
Hubble's planned replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is not due to be launched until 2011 at the earliest.
But former astronaut James Grunsfeld, who himself participated in the last Hubble servicing mission, said on Friday that NASA had made the right decision, albeit a sad one. "It's one that's in the best interest of NASA," he said.
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
18:53 05 September 2008
