The shuttle Discovery will pay the Hubble Space Telescope a final servicing call in 2008, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced Tuesday.
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
That's really no news as Griffin had always expressed to use a shuttle mission to service Hubble for one last time. It was originally assigned to Endeavour, but changes had Discovery being chosen instead. Long prior to the official announcement, NASA had already decided to possibly assign Discovery to the mission and give it mission number STS-125.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
I'm all for converting it into a death ray. Hmmm...maybe converting it into a giant electro-magnet to sweep up some of the space junk making future exploration dangerous. ...or crashing it into the ISS: also a worthy endeavour.
...also, pointing it at Venus would be cool- maybe the asteroid belt.
Posted by Da_bang80 (Member # 528) on :
Has anyone heard of any plans to replace Hubble?
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Cool, I bet you'll be able to take pictures of Venutian nudists with that.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
It's not REALLY a replacement, as it's a purely infrared spectrum telescope. It'll certainly produce some insanely good pictures of stellar phenomena with post-processing, but not "real colour" pictures of anything in the visible spectrum.
Mark
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
Yeah, for that you need the Jack Webb Space Telescope. But then all you get are pictures of crime in LA.