06-December-2005, 07:15 PM
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Vulcan Moderator
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Greenbelt, MD
Posts: 24,225
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Hubble servicing mission planned
Servicing the Hubble:
Shuttle mission plans refined
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Preparations for a shuttle mission to upgrade and repair the Hubble Space Telescope in late 2007 or early 2008 are picking up steam as engineers map out the details of a five-spacewalk flight designed to keep the venerable observatory alive and well through at least 2013.
Servicing Mission 4, canceled by former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe in January 2004, is expected to be officially reinstated by current Administrator Mike Griffin if the next shuttle mission, STS-121, goes smoothly and if ongoing analyses show the flight can be conducted in relative safety.
"For any given single mission, I would say that the Hubble servicing represents the highest priority utilization of a single shuttle mission that I can conceive," Griffin said in a recent interview. "Because servicing the Hubble is something only the shuttle can do, it's only one flight and is, therefore, I think a very high agency priority if we can do it technically."
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Hope for the STIS:
Quote:
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They also are considering a repair job that could restore the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph to operation. The instrument was shut down in 2004 when a power supply failed. It now appears installation of a single electronic "card" could restore one of the instrument's two redundant operating systems to life.
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