Scientists eager to see Hubble’s facelift

New and improved
NASA hopes the upcoming upgrades will help Hubble have a healthy life for a while yet. To that end, they've planned a packed mission to leave the telescope in the best shape possible.

The numerous activities scheduled for the five busy spacewalking days will be a challenging undertaking, mission managers said.

"Even if we just get one day [of spacewalking repairs] in, we'd have a much better telescope than we have now," said Keith Walyus, operations manager for the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. "If we get all this done — wow, that's going to be absolutely amazing."

The mission has had a rocky history. Originally cancelled in the wake of the Columbia disaster in 2003, for a while NASA deemed it too risky and expensive a venture.

NASA considered sending a robotic repair mission to Hubble instead, but eventually decided a manned mission was the only way to accomplish what needed to be done.

"The technology they were looking at is amazing," Walyus said of the proposed robotic fixes, "but it's just not the same as a human. This was built to be worked on by humans."

Ultimately the strong public and political support for the mission helped influence NASA to decide to return to the space telescope one last time.

"The American people stood up and said wait a minute, not so fast, this is our telescope," David Leckrone, Hubble senior project scientist at Goddard, said of the response to the mission's cancellation.

Beloved by many
The telescope achieves its amazing feats by orbiting 360 miles (575 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. From that height, Hubble can bypass our planet's thick atmosphere, which blocks out light and distorts the view from space — an effect akin to looking at trees from the bottom of a swimming pool.

While Hubble's 94.5-inch-wide (2.4-meter-wide primary mirror would be considered dinky compared with the largest ground-based observatories (the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, has two scopes with 10-meter, or 400-inch, primary mirrors), in space it is enough to observe the distant cosmos in unmatched detail.

These visions have produced not only groundbreaking scientific discoveries, but also unprecedented enthusiasm from nonscientists.

"When the public saw for the first time the absolute stunning beauty of the universe we live in, that was a major shift in the way people looked at the world," Leckrone said. "I think there's a big element of pride on the part of the American people in having produced Hubble and used it in this way. I think as a species we all take collective pride in, hey, this is something we did, and it was something very hard to do."

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