Liberal Repercussion

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/17/science/17HUBB.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

January 17, 2004
NASA Cancels Trip to Supply Hubble, Sealing Early Doom
By DENNIS OVERBYE

avor those cosmic postcards while you can. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decreed an early death yesterday to one of its flagship missions and most celebrated successes, the Hubble Space Telescope.

In a midday meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., 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 managers of the space telescope that there would be no more shuttle visits to maintain it.

A visit by astronauts 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, the crown jewel of astronomy for 10 years, will probably die in orbit sometime in 2007, depending on when its batteries or gyroscopes fail for good.

"It could die tomorrow, it could last to 2011," said Dr. Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore. Dr. Beckwith said he and his colleagues were devastated.

At a news conference last night, Dr. John M. Grunsfeld, the agency's chief scientist and an astronaut who has been to the Hubble two times, called the the telescope the "best marriage of human spaceflight and science."

"It is a sad day that we have to announce this," Dr. Grunsfeld added.

As the news flashed around the world by e-mail, other astronomers joined the Hubble team in their shock. Dr. David N. Spergel, an astronomer at Princeton and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science, called it a "double whammy" for astronomy. Not only was a telescope being lost, but $200 million worth of instruments that had been built to be added in the later shuttle mission will also be left on the ground, Dr. Spergel said.

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

Dr. Tod Lauer, of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, said, "This is a pretty nasty turn of events, coming immediately on the heels of `W's' endorsement of space exploration."

The demise of the Hubble will leave astronomers with no foreseeable prospect of a telescope in space operating primarily at visible wavelengths. The announcement also precludes hopes that astronomers had of using the Hubble in tandem with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launching in 2011 and which is being designed for infrared wavelengths, to study galaxies at the far reaches of time.

posted by Rei Toei @ 2:40 p.m.