Los Angeles Times November 01, 2006
NASA chief approves Hubble repair mission
By John Johnson Jr.
NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin gave the go-ahead for a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope on Tuesday, declaring the goal of saving one of the space agency's most popular science missions to be worth the risk of a shuttle flight.
The mission would launch as early as May 2008, carrying new cameras, batteries and gyroscopes. Hubble is currently operating on only two of six gyroscopes and battery power is running down. Without the repair mission, the space telescope would become space junk by 2009, at the latest.
The new equipment would keep the space telescope, which has transmitted thousands of images and helped to answer some of the deepest questions about the universe since its launch 16 years ago, operating until at least 2013.
"I am fully confident this mission will go as flawlessly as any of us could imagine," Griffin told a packed auditorium at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where the Hubble program is based.
Employees worried about job security because of the uncertainty over Hubble's future gave Griffin a standing ovation.
"It's a great day for science," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., one of the strongest backers in Congress of a Hubble relief mission. "The Hubble telescope has been the greatest telescope since Galileo invented the first one."
With the repairs and upgrades, "we are essentially going to get a new Hubble," she said.
The new instruments will enable the telescope, orbiting 333 miles over Earth's surface, to probe the secrets of the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the theorized event that created all the matter and energy in the universe. Scientists are hopeful that it will help unravel such cosmological mysteries as the source and location of dark energy and matter.
The mission is expected to cost around $900 million, but Mikulski announced she would introduce legislation with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to reimburse NASA up to $1 billion in expenses.
In deciding to go ahead with the repair mission, Griffin reversed a decision by his predecessor, Sean O'Keefe, who said the danger to astronauts was simply too great. O'Keefe made his decision in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster in 2003. Columbia was damaged by insulating foam flaking off the shuttle's giant external fuel tank and was destroyed on re-entry.
O'Keefe said future shuttle flights would only go to the International Space Station. That way, the crew of a damaged shuttle could use the station as a "safe haven" while they awaited rescue.
There will be no retreat for astronauts at Hubble. Because the space telescope orbits at a higher altitude than the space station, as well as on a different plane, crew members would be unable to fly a damaged shuttle to the station to await rescue.
Instead, they would have to wait at the Hubble site for a rescue ship, relying on provisions they bring with them.
"We all know flying the shuttle carries more risk than we would like," Griffin said. "It can be flown safely, if we are careful."
He said upgrades to the shuttle since the Columbia accident have made it a safer vehicle. The shuttles Discovery and Atlantis have flown three missions safely in the past two years.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space policy research firm, said the decision to launch a Hubble repair mission is ill-advised. "It has always struck me as daring the fates," he said. "It seems to me they are taking a big chance."
Most former astronauts and scientists contacted Tuesday supported the mission. "I think it's a great idea," said Rusty Schweikert, a former Apollo astronaut.
Space scientists hope that by repairing Hubble, it will provide a smooth transition in space-based science to the next generation orbiting telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. That instrument had been scheduled to launch in 2011, but higher costs have pushed it back to 2013.
In case something goes wrong, a second space shuttle will be sitting on pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be ready to blast off on a rescue mission within 25 days. The shuttle carrying the repair crew will have enough food and water to last that long.
© Copyright 2006, Los Angeles Times
