Astronomers at Ball Aerospace and the University of Colorado at Boulder get one last shot to service the Hubble Space Telescope before NASA officially retires its shuttle program in two years.
The 18-year-old telescope, which will get two new $70 million instruments in October, can function on its own for at least five years beyond this mission.
After that, if someone or something doesn’t make a pit stop, different systems will begin to fail, said Mark LaPole, Ball Aerospace program manager for Hubble.
The new camera, said to be 35 times more efficient than its current one, and spectrograph, which measures temperature and chemical composition, will help astronomers look farther, faster and more efficiently into the universe.
“It is essential to understand how structures are formed in the cosmos,” said CU-Boulder professor Jim Greene, spectrograph team leader for the mission. “How did we get from a smooth universe to a structured universe?”
Since it first launched in 1990, Hubble has shed light on the evolution of the solar system, the age of the universe (it’s about 14 billion years old) and the rate that it’s expanding.
“It’s a fantastic resource for the nation and the world,” said Harold Reitsema, Ball Aerospace astronomer and Hubble program spokesman. “Science textbooks have been rewritten by Hubble.”
The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to blast off Oct. 8 for the fifth and final mission to Hubble since the telescope went into orbit.
The last flight for NASA’s shuttle program is set for May 31, 2010.
The program will be officially retired in September 2010, making way for the Constellation program — which is intended to take Americans back to the moon by 2020.
Since researchers hope to bring Hubble back to Earth one day, astronauts will attach “soft capture” equipment to the telescope so that a future robotic mission can retrieve it, LaPole said.
NASA’s plans could change between now and then, especially since a new administration will take office in 2009.
“There is nothing on the books, but they didn’t preclude it either,” LaPole said. “So it’s possible.”
Steve Graff: 303-954-1661 or sgraff@denverpost.com
