The end of Hubble Space Telescope?
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The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) will probably die before 2010 due to insufficient financial resources to service it. There is no official announcement by NASA yet, but it is expected for 7 February 2005 during the presentation of the 2006 budget. (Sources: BBC, Space.com).
The photo shows Hubble after the third servicing mission (SM3B, STS109). Photo courtesy of NASA.
The fourth and final servicing mission was scheduled to take place in 2006. However, the White House eliminated the necessary funding (over US$1 billion) and as a result several components of Hubble, most probably its batteries, are expected to stop operating in the next 2-4 years, while the whole telescope will be directed towards the Earth oceans soon after. "It will be a great loss for science", American astronomer Holland C. Ford said. (Source: Space.com).
Hubble was deployed 600km above the Earth on 25 April 1990 by the space shuttle Discovery during the STS-31 mission. The orbiting telescope cost US$1.5 billion and every year it costs an additional US$230-250 million to keep it in operation, analyse the data it transmits and develop new hardware or software. It is named in honour of astronomer Edwin Hubble and is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) on behalf of NASA. (Sources: NASA, Space.com).
HST was designed to be maintained with servicing missions operated from space shuttles every few years, a conception that saved billions of dollars. On 2 December 1993, the first servicing mission (SM1) replaced the solar arrays, upgraded the HST computer, installed the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) unit, and made numerous other maintenance tasks. SM1 was operated by the space shuttle Endeavour in its STS-61 flight. The second servicing mission (SM2), operated by Discovery in flight STS-82 on 11 February 1997, installed the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) - which stopped operating on 3 August 2004 due to a power supply failure. The third servicing mission was completed in two phases: SM3A and SM3B. During the first phase, operated by spache shuttle Discovery in flight STS-103 on 19 December 1999, the astronauts repaired two Rate Sensor Units (RSU) which contain gyroscopes, installed a new computer (20 times faster compared to the old one) and a new space-to-ground data transmitter (as a replacement for HST's original transmitter which had failed in 1998) before re-deploying HST in orbit on Christmas Day. In the second phase, operated by space shuttle Columbia in flight STS-109 on 1 March 2002, the solar arrays were replaced again and two instruments were installed: The NICMOS Cooling System (NCS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). SM3B was the last servicing mission, but a fourth mission is necessary if we want to keep Hubble operational. (Source: NASA).
Will Hubble have the fate of Mir?
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Notice: The attached photos show the Hubble Space Telescope after servicing from SM3B (STS-109, 9 March 2002) and the Egg Nebula (CRL 2688). The Egg Nebula photo was produced by Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA. To the best of our knowledge, the photos are in the public domain, courtesy of NASA. The original photo of HST is located here, while the original photo of the Egg Nebula is here. This article is not endorsed by NASA or any other organisation referenced in the article.
