Breaking NASA News
This just crossed the Reuters wire at 4:20pm EST on Monday:
The aging Hubble Space Telescope --a path-breaking scientific instrument whose eye-catching images have won fans around the world -- would die in orbit under the 2006 budget for NASA proposed on Monday. The U.S. space agency's total budget would rise 2.4 percent over 2005 to about $16.5 billion, but only $93 million would be spent on Hubble, with $75 million of that aimed at bringing the observatory down to Earth safely, NASA's comptroller said.
The aging Hubble Space Telescope --a path-breaking scientific instrument whose eye-catching images have won fans around the world -- would die in orbit under the 2006 budget for NASA proposed on Monday. The U.S. space agency's total budget would rise 2.4 percent over 2005 to about $16.5 billion, but only $93 million would be spent on Hubble, with $75 million of that aimed at bringing the observatory down to Earth safely, NASA's comptroller said.
posted by cvo @ 1:21 PM
2 Comments:
At 5:31 PM,
R said…
It's sad to see the end of Hubble, after it's had a fantastic run. Folks were kind of expecting this, after the National Academy of Sciences trashed the robotic servicing mission. From what I heard second-hand, they thought it was a neat idea, but questioned whether it could be done in time. What's interesting is that they also recommended that NASA service HST with the Shuttle, which NASA says the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations prevent them from doing. Of course, Congress could still say to NASA, we don't care what the President says, we want you to do robotic servicing anyway. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Regardless, HST will be around for a few more years on its own, and there will still need to be a nifty automated rendezvous, which the US has never done, to attach a deorbit module to it. And the James Webb Space Telescope will hopefully be operational without too much down time after the HST is safely dumped in the Pacific. JWST will be looking at a part of the spectrum that HST can't really see, so it should produce some really exciting science. It will also be in a really interesting orbit at one of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points, where the sun's and the earth's gravity interact with each other and the centrifugal "force" of JWST's orbit so as to make JWST appear to "hover" about the Lagrange point in a large "halo" as viewed from the earth.
At 9:10 AM,
Unknown said…
I think that Ball Aerospace (where I work) is involved in both the Hubble de-orbit mission and in the building of JWST. The really interesting thing is to see what will be done with the new components already built for Hubble but now not to be installed on Hubble.
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