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Hubble Should See Better Than Ever After Final Tune-Up

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The Washington Post

Published: July 13, 2008

By the end of the year, the world's greatest telescope should be able to see deeper into space and further back in time than ever. If all goes as planned, it will detect events closer to the big bang, explore the "cosmic web" of galaxies and intergalactic gas that make up the large-scale structure of the universe, and reveal much more about how and when distant stars and planets were formed.

NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts are finalizing plans to fly the space shuttle this fall on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to repair and upgrade the orbiting observatory that revolutionized astronomy. The long-delayed servicing mission will be the last for the Hubble, NASA says, but it will allow the telescope to perform at its highest level ever for the last five or six years of its operating life.

"This will be the first time ever that instrument box is full," said Hubble senior scientist David Leckrone last week. "We will have the most powerful imaging capability on Hubble ever, and possibly anywhere."

It is hard to overstate the importance of the Hubble and its insights into the evolution of the universe, the presence of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, and the existence of hundreds (and probably many more) of planets orbiting distant stars.

In a briefing at the Goddard Space Flight Center, scientists said observations by the telescope have resulted in an average of 12 published discoveries a week for years, and that almost 4,400 principal and co-investigators have produced articles based on its data.

"This is surely the most productive telescope in history," said Charles Mattias "Matt" Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.

It also has the most remarkable history. The upcoming mission, scheduled for early October, will be the fifth to the Hubble, which orbits almost 350 miles above Earth. Launched with great fanfare in 1990 after long delays, the more than $3 billion instrument (funded by NASA but with contributions from the European Space Agency) initially did not work because of an embarrassing mistake in shaping its 2.4-meter mirror.

But the Hubble's developers and managers went from goats to heroes in 1993 when the first-ever repair mission in orbit succeeded in installing corrective optics that allowed the telescope to begin sending back spectacular and often awe-inspiring images. Subsequent space shuttle missions steadily upgraded the observatory and its capabilities, and the Hubble gradually achieved iconic status.

Time and the harsh environment of space takes a toll, however, and NASA began planning one final upgrade - until the 2003 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia. Heightened safety concerns led NASA to cancel the mission, but a public outcry ensued.

In 2006, newly appointed NASA Administrator Michael Griffin reversed the earlier decision and gave the go-ahead to the final repair mission.

This last servicing also will deliver two new instruments - the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (which will explore the cosmic web in extreme ultraviolet frequencies) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (which will allow the telescope to "see" across the light spectrum from ultraviolet to optical and infrared). Over the course of five strenuous spacewalks, astronauts also will work to repair cameras and equipment that have degraded or failed.

The two instruments - weighing a total of 11 tons - are now in a massive "clean room" at Goddard's Greenbelt, Md., campus, where engineers and technicians are conducting final tests and preparing to ship them to the Kennedy Space Center to be loaded onto the space shuttle Atlantis.

Assuming the mission goes off as planned, the first new Hubble data and images are expected by early next year.

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