(Austin, TX) In the fall of 2008, NASA will send a crew aboard the Atlantis space shuttle to perform a final service mission on the Hubble Space Telescope, a panel of scientists announced in Austin at the 211th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Astronaut John Grunsfeld told Earth & Sky that repair work and upgrades to Hubble will “reinvent” the space telescope. “The detector technology and the wavelength coverage that we’ll have,” said Grunsfeld, “is going to allow us to have new views of the universe that are just going to astound and amaze everyone, scientists and amateur astronomers, everybody.” Grunsfeld is Lead Spacewalker and Payload Officer for the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4, and this will be his third trip to the Hubble, which orbits 350 miles above Earth.
The mission will entail five spacewalks and aims to increase the telescope’s capabilities by a factor of 90, according to panelist Sandra Faber, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz. After the repairs and upgrades, “it’ll have the capability of 100 Hubbles,” said panelist and NASA Chief Scientist Alan Stern.
When asked about the risks posed by the Hubble service mission, Astronaut Grunsfeld told Earth & Sky that, “I think the cause of science is something worth risking my life for. I’ve spent almost my entire adult life and most of my young life,” Grunsfeld added, “in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. And Hubble is almost an icon for the quest of scientific knowledge.”
So many things could be said about Hubble…a telescope whose breathtaking images have shaped our understanding of the world that extends well beyond the farthest reaches of our galaxy…Hubble has challenged the role of humankind in the larger Universe…Besides its unprecedented contributions to science, the HST will be remembered as one of the most successful examples of cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. The project is just an achievement in its own right.
Fingers crossed for the success of this mission!