Astronauts Say Hubble Is Ready for Another Decade of Service
ATLANTA — Two spacewalking astronauts who helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope last month said Friday that the nearly 10-year-old spacecraft is a bit tattered but ready for another decade or more of cosmic observation.
“There are little tears in the insulation, [it is] ragged around the edges, but when you look a little deeper inside, it looks like a brand new telescope,” astronaut John Grunsfeld said of the Hubble orbiter.
Asked how much longer the satellite could continue to operate, Grunsfeld said that the issue was whether “we continue to put up instruments [on Hubble] that have an order of magnitude in sensitivity so that it stays in the forefront of being a great observatory. And I think the answer is clearly yes . . . I think that will certainly be true for another 10 years, maybe longer.”
Grunsfeld’s crew mate, Claude Nicollier, agreed with that estimate at a joint news conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta.
Both Grunsfeld, of NASA, and Nicollier, of the European Space Agency, are astrophysicists as well as astronauts.
They replaced gyroscopes, a central computer, a guidance sensor and a radio transmitter on Hubble.
Hubble was launched in April 1990 as the first telescope that would not have to contend with the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere.
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