Hubble to get fifth, final fix-up
Repairs and a new camera could add five to seven years to the 19-year-old telescope.
WASHINGTON - Using the power of pictures, the Hubble Space Telescope has snapped away at the mystery of the universe. For 19 years, it has shown the epic violence of crashing galaxies, spied on the birth and death of stars, taught cosmic lessons, and even provided comic relief.
In Hubble's photos, believers witness the hand of God, nonbelievers see astronomy in action, and artists discover galaxies worthy of galleries.
Now Hubble is set to get its fifth and final fix-up. The weather at Cape Canaveral, Fla., was expected to be good today for the space shuttle Atlantis to lift off at 2 p.m. on a flight to the orbiting telescope 350 miles above Earth. The 11-day mission will include five painstaking spacewalks, in which astronauts will repair and replace broken instruments, add a new long-gazing camera, then say goodbye forever to Hubble.
If it all works, Hubble will get an additional five to seven years of life before it is steered by remote control into a watery grave.
"We have seven years of accumulated maintenance work to do," Hubble program manager Preston Burch said yesterday. "So you can imagine if you had a car and you were driving it every day for seven years and never took it into the shop. You would have quite a list of things to do on it."
Senior Hubble scientist Mario Livio rhapsodized about the drama of Hubble's story: "Turning something that could have been the biggest scientific fiasco to the biggest scientific success."
After its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was stuck with blurry vision because its mirror wasn't quite right. It was the butt of jokes by late-night comics. It seemed like a massively overbudget screw-up.
But once it was fixed 31/2 years later with a new set of glasses, Hubble shed its myopic reputation. It began producing far-sighted images of space that seemed more art than astronomy.
Hubble helped pinpoint the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, explain what's in it, and show where it is going. Its photos hinted that Earth may not be the only planet of its kind. Just one picture of warped distant galaxies provided visual proof of Einstein's general-relativity theory.
"Hubble actually allows our human minds and spirits to travel light-years, even billions of light-years," said NASA sciences chief Ed Weiler. The photo "Hubble Ultra Deep Field" views a time when the universe was about 700 million years old, so the stars in it are 13 billion light-years away. One light-year is 5.9 trillion miles.
A camera to be installed in this flight should enable astronomers to look an extra 200 million light-years farther back, Hubble chief scientist David Leckrone said. If everything goes well with the repair mission, he said, Hubble will be at its sharpest ever.
A Hubble image in 1995 forever erased the telescope's tarnished early reputation. The picture was the Eagle Nebula. It was stunning, with beautiful colors and dramatic clouds where stars formed. NASA called it "the pillars of creation."
And the public, which once snickered at Hubble, was smitten. Hubble has snapped 570,000 pictures, some catching the birth of stars and planets.
When age finally caught up with Hubble - it was designed to last 10 to 15 years - NASA first decided the telescope would just have to slowly die. An astronaut-repair mission was deemed too risky during the period shortly after the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, which killed seven astronauts. But public opinion and politicians persuaded NASA to change its mind.