A few years ago NASA announced that it would not be sending any additional servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). There was quite an outcry from the public and the astronomy community (both amateur and professional). I remember taking some questions about it from the local press, and a surprising (to me) number of regular people asking me a lot of questions about it.
Well, as you may have heard, NASA has announce a new servicing mission to the HST, to take place sometime in 2008. The mission will be called SM4 (slightly misleading, since this will be the fifth servicing mission), and will be made up of Scott D. Altman (Mission Commander), Navy Reserve Capt. Gregory C. Johnson (Pilot), veteran spacewalkers John M. Grunsfeld and Michael J. Massimino and first-time space fliers Andrew J. Feustel, Michael T. Good and K. Megan McArthur (Mission Specialists).
As well as repairing instruments that have failed and installing new operational hardware (batteries, gyroscopes, and thermal blankets), the HST will get two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). According to NASA the COS will:
…measure the structure and composition of the ordinary matter concentrated in the “cosmic web,” long, narrow filaments of galaxies and intergalactic gas separated by huge voids. COS will use faint distant quasars as “cosmic flashlights,” whose beams of light pass through the cosmic web. Absorption of this light by “stuff” in the web reveals characteristics of that material. This allows scientists to determine its composition and its specific location in space.
and the WFC3
…will extend Hubble’s capability to see deep into the universe, with the power to observe in multiple wavelengths (colors) of light including infrared, visible and ultraviolet light. WFC3 can, for example, observe young, hot stars that glow predominantly in ultraviolet and older, cooler stars that glow predominantly in infrared in the same galaxy. The first stars and galaxies to form in the universe are so old and distant that their light is now relegated to infrared wavelengths.
This will be the final mission to the HST. Hubble was launched in 1990, and has past its planned operational lifetime. Its replacement will be the James Webb Space Telescope, currently scheduled for launch in 2013.
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