The Hubble Space Telescope will get a manned service mission after all, NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced on 31 October. Discussion over whether to go back to the HST had pitted popular support against opposition by NASA headquarters. Griffin received a standing ovation from scientists present at the announcement at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, home of the HST operations.
A $900 million, 11-day service mission by the space shuttle Discovery, planned for May 2008, will replace gyroscopes, batteries, and a guidance sensor, and attempt to fix the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which was installed in 1997 and stopped working in 2004. The mission will also replace the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 with an improved model and replace the lenses used to correct the HST mirror (the COSTAR module) with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which can work without COSTAR. The crew will also affix a...
