The Hubble Lives On

tanman writes "CNN reports that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has agreed to send astronauts on one final mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. No date was reported for the mission, other than before the shuttle fleet is retired. From the article, 'A rehab mission would keep Hubble working until about 2013. It would add two new camera instruments, upgrade aging batteries and stabilizing equipment, add new guidance sensors and repair a light-separating spectrograph. Without a servicing mission, Hubble will likely deteriorate in 2009 or 2010.'"

Comments

Re:Who would have thought that

[Explo]

Regarding the replacement (well, close enough, even though the JWST is more focused on infrared observations); yes, it's hopefully going to be launched to the space around 2013 or so. However, Hubble won't last that long and it would be quite inconvenient to have a gap of several years between them without any comparable IR/visible light telescopes in space.

Regarding the ground-based telescopes, while adaptive optics and other fancy things allow them to outperform Hubble in some ways such as resolving power, there are still things they can't do. The ground-based telescopes are unable to observe anything for a significant part of the time because sun is happily shining on the sky and reflecting off the atmosphere. Likewise, no matter where you place the telescope under the atmosphere, weather will occasionally be an issue and atmosphere also tends to absorb some of the wavelenghts, although that's not a big issue on visible light. Additionally, atmospheric glow, no matter whether it's from reflected light pollution or natural, makes observations of very dim targets more difficult on the ground.