The shuttle Discovery will pay the Hubble Space Telescope a final servicing call in 2008, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced Tuesday.
The new plan reverses a decision made by former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe in the wake of the Columbia disaster that such a mission would be too risky to attempt.
“We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle’s manifest, to be flown before it retires,” Griffin told employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where Hubble operations are based. He received a standing ovation.
Discovery will be commanded by veteran astronaut Scott Altman. His crew will include pilot Greg Johnson, robotic arm operator Megan McAurthur, and space walkers John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Andrew Fuestel and Michael Good.
The final Hubble mission, scheduled for May 2008, will install two new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3.
The astronauts also will service Hubble’s gyroscopes, which keep the telescope stable for high-precision pointing.
October 31st, 2006 | Space | No comments
Recently, ESA’s Mars Express delivered photos of the famous ‘Face on Mars’ in the Cydonia region. The High Resolution Stereo Camera images are some of the most spectacular views of the Red Planet ever taken.