The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 5, 2006

Official News - page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: HUBBLE TELESCOPE SAVED

by Hazed

The future of the Hubble telescope has been in doubt for some time. NASA was refusing to commit to a mission to service the scope, because of all the recent problems with the shuttle, and requests for a robotic mission had also been turned down on grounds of cost.

When NASA's budget for 2006 was released last year, it did not include any missions to hubble. The telescope's fading batteries need to be serviced and so does its gyroscopes, or it will probably stop taking pictures by 2007 or 2008. Until the shuttles were all grounded, a manned mission had been planned to repair Hubble, but suddenly the future looked bleak for the telescope.

Now, NASA has announced that shuttle astronauts will make one final visit to Hubble and will fix it up as planned, thus extending its expected life to 2013. The flight is tentatively set for sometime in 2008.

For more details, see the Hubble site.


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