Nasa all set to retire Hubble

NASA announced on Friday it would cancel a space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, a decision that dictates an early demise for the most storied science programme in NASA’s history.

The Hubble has sent a steady diet of spectacular space images to Earth since it was launched in 1990. It has been invaluable in helping astronomers and astrophysics understand how the universe was formed and how stars are born and die.

The Hubble could malfunction at any time, but NASA predicts a failure between 2006 and 2008. At some point after that, a robotic ship will be used to push the satellite out of orbit and it will burn in the Earth’s atmosphere.

A mission for mid-2005 would have repaired broken gyroscopes used to aim the Hubble and astronauts would have replaced batteries that are working on borrowed time. —Reuters