NASA will let Hubble telescope die

Savor those cosmic postcards while you can.

On Friday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decreed an early death to one of its flagship missions and most celebrated successes, the Hubble Space Telescope.

In a midday meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, two days after President Bush ordered NASA to redirect its resources toward human exploration of the moon and Mars, the agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe told the space telescope's managers that there would be no more shuttle visits to maintain it.

A visit to install a couple of the telescope's scientific instruments and replace the gyroscopes and batteries had been planned for next year. Without any more visits, the telescope will probably die in orbit sometime in 2007, depending on when its batteries or gyroscopes fail.

"It could die tomorrow, it could last to 2011," said Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Institute. He said he and his colleagues were devastated.

At a press conference Friday evening, John Grunsfeld, the agency's chief scientist and an astronaut who has been to the Hubble twice, called the Hubble the "best marriage of human spaceflight and science," adding, "It is a sad day that we have to announce this."

Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and also a member of the advisory committee, said, "I think this is a mistake," noting that Hubble was still doing unique work at the forefront of science.

In the wake of the Columbia catastrophe a year ago the missions are also considered dangerous.

In its report last summer on the shuttle disaster, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended that there be a way to inspect and repair the shuttle's heat shields, which were damaged after Columbia's liftoff.

This is easily done if the craft is at the space station, but not at the Hubble, and the shuttles do not carry enough fuel to get from the telescope to the space station.

In his remarks to the astronomers on Friday, according to those present, O'Keefe referred to this recommendation and said it would be too difficult to develop that ability for a single trip to the telescope.

Given enough time, NASA might have developed the tools to do it, Grunsfeld said.

Cost, he said, was not an issue, but other astronomers were skeptical.

For now anyway, Hubble lives. Beckwith said, "We at the institute are devastated by the potential loss of Hubble, but we will do our absolute best to make the final years of its life the most glorious science you've ever seen."