05.11.09
Shuttle at Hubble, hopefully no trouble.
Update: Today is the first of five spacewalks to give Hubble a oil change and rotate the instruments, so to speak.
I’m going to leave off updating further unless something unexpected occurs, y’all can find the news about it easy enough.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/
Shuttle Atlantis, flying STS-125, is going to the Hubble Space Telescope for the last servicing mission of the orbiting observatory. Two instruments will be replaced to do new science, and lots of elderly parts will be replaced to extend the life of the telescope for as long as possible.
This is a success story of extensible architecture taking advantage of ongoing advancements where possible. Other than the picky detail of the freight costs, the hubble could be upgraded for some time to come.
The current plan is to do this last maintenance run, and by the time a system failure kills it, we’ll have an even bigger observatory (James Webb Space Telescope/JWST) operating. Saw a model of it when I was in germany outside the Munich science museum, and yeah, it’s huge. http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ The telescope part alone (the part with the hexagonal mirrors and such, above the shield, by itself is about the size of a bus. It folds up for launch of course.
