NASA Waits for Go-Ahead to Save Hubble Telescope

Oct. 30, 2006 — -- The Hubble Space Telescope looks like the comeback kid of the decade.

Just two years ago it was doomed to die when the shuttle mission to service it was canceled, one of the first casualties of NASA budget tightening to finance President Bush's ambitious Moon-Mars mission vision.

The mission was also deemed too risky to fly by former administrator Sean O'Keefe.

But political pressure and the emergence of a new NASA administrator who once worked on the Hubble revived hope that the celebrated telescope could be saved with one more shuttle mission, scheduled now for spring 2008.

On Tuesday, NASA officials are expected to announce plans to repair the Hubble in the mission.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin spent last Friday listening to an engineering team debate the pros and cons of a mission to service Hubble.

Earlier this summer, Griffin said Hubble was a priority for him.

"Hubble is one of the great observatories," he said. "It has revealed fundamental things about the universe of which we had no idea, and would have had no idea. It is one of the great scientific instruments of all time. It is not outmoded. It needs some refurbishment and repair."

Tuesday's expected formal announcement will come as no surprise to the flight control team, which has already been training for this mission.

Flight director Tony Ceccacci will head the team choreographing this very complicated service mission.

Astronaut Mike Massimino, who flew on the last mission, has spent the last few months training the crew who will fly on SMA4 -- though he politely declined to reveal who was training for this mission.

The identity of the crew will be revealed at a news conference Tuesday.

The Hubble mission will require five back-to-back spacewalks.

One of the most complicated will be fixing an instrument called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. There won't be enough time to build a replacement imaging spectrograph, so the astronauts will have to repair this very delicate instrument in place.