January 17, 2004
First casualty in the trip to Mars
The Rotten Egg Nebula - photo from Hubble
NASA has announced, only two days after George Bush’s announcement that the USA wants to put men back on the moon and send a manned mission to Mars, that there will be no more trips to service the Hubble telescope.
The Hubble telescope, which has delivered spectacular pictures of the universe over the last ten years (since the orginal defective mirror was replaced in 1993) needs regular servicing by astronauts to replace gyroscopes, batteries and other hardware. A mission was planned for 2005, which would have been required to allow the telescope to operate until its planned decommissioning in 2010. It will now remain in service until the gyroscopes or batteries fail, which is expected to be in 2007.
The reason for the cancellation is that the Space Shuttle is to be retired by 2010 and because of the current grounding of the shuttle after the Columbia disaster and Bush’s focus on completing the ISS (International Space Staion) in preparation for putting a man on the moon, the remaining shuttle flights will be directed to the completion of the IIS.
The decision also affects NASA’s plans to decommission the telescope - instead of bringing it back to Earth in a space shuttle and exhibiting it in the Smithsonian Institute at the end of its useful life, they have announced that they will send a robot rocket to the telescope, which will attach itself to Hubble and then brake it out of orbit to drop it into the ocean.