The End of the Hubble Space Telescope

The bright side for Hubble is that it still has a good bit of life left in it. The most pressing risk is that the large gyroscopes used to control the satellite will fail, but there is good reason to believe they will last until 2008, giving us at least a few more years of good science. The batteries should last that long, probably not giving out themselves until 2010. And there is work underway to evaluate reducing the number of gyros being actively used to control Hubble, so that one could be kept in a storage mode and brought back on-line in the event of a failure. If this proposal could be successfully implemented, it could extend the life of the space telescope for at least awhile--though there'll be no getting around the final loss of the batteries when they do eventually fail.

So, for what it's worth, we certainly aren't talking about euthanizing Hubble, bringing it down later this year or anything like that. Instead, we're geared towards getting the maximum use out of Hubble's remaining service life, and towards extending that lifetime as much as we can with the resources available aboard the telescope. But, not everyone is happy.

A body of activists led by Robert Zubrin (of the Mars Society) and Rick Tumlinson (of the Space Frontier Foundation) is pressing for a manned service mission now that the robotic mission appears to have given up the ghost. In a press release, they framed the issue at hand starkly: "[E]ither send astronauts to repair and upgrade Hubble as originally planned, or lose the greatest astronomical observatory ever built."

And when you put it that way, it's hard not to wonder whether the manned service mission really would be worth the risk, after all.


http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/04/01...

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