Panel Urges Mission to Keep Hubble Telescope Operating

The Hubble Space Telescope is worth saving, a National Research Council panel said Tuesday in urging NASA to pursue a shuttle flight or a robotic mission to repair it.

As recently as January, the telescope’s days appeared to be numbered. Influenced by President Bush’s plans to develop new spacecraft to send humans to Mars, NASA announced it was canceling all shuttle servicing missions to Hubble. The telescope would continue to operate until 2007 or 2008 without inspection or repair, the space agency estimated.

But the committee -- which was charged with evaluating the telescope and assessing options to extend its life -- stressed in its interim report that the “scientific returns from Hubble are far from their natural end.”

“The Hubble Space Telescope is arguably the most important telescope in history,” the panel said.

NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe agreed with the assessment from the National Research Council, a branch of the National Academies.

“NASA is committed to exploring ways to safely extend the useful scientific life of Hubble,” he said.

Louis J. Lanzerotti, chairman of the panel, said that the committee did not start its investigation with a bias toward “saving Hubble just to save Hubble.”

After initial studies, however, committee members wanted to stress to NASA their consensus that the space agency should pursue both manned and robotic missions so that the insights into the cosmos provided by the telescope would continue.

“The bottom line is that the committee as a whole ... really believed that Hubble has provided a perspective on astronomy that is absolutely unique,” Lanzerotti said.

In its 14 years, the Hubble mission has exceeded expectations.

The telescope has discovered dozens of planets and numerous adolescent galaxies and revealed black holes at the centers of nearby galaxies.

It has taken detailed full-globe photos of Mars and captured images of distant phenomena that shed light on how stars and solar systems have been formed.

The committee said that instruments built in preparation for the next shuttle visit to Hubble would increase the telescope’s capabilities -- providing, among other things, real-time glimpses of the final assembly of galaxies.

The committee said that the technologies required for proposed robotic service missions remained uncertain, and so it was too early to exclude the possibility of a manned flight. As a result, it urged NASA to continue aggressively pursuing both alternatives.

The committee said it would continue to evaluate the risks of such a shuttle mission before it released its final report in late summer or early fall.

The shuttle has been grounded since the Columbia disaster in February 2003.

O’Keefe said that “the challenges of a robotic mission are under examination and we’ll continue our exhaustive and aggressive efforts to assess innovative servicing options.”

He added that a manned mission to Hubble was a possibility once the shuttle is back in action.

“We’re committed to doing everything possible to safely extend the scientific life of this valuable asset,” he said.