NASA Sets a Date with HST

It looks like the next servicing mission for the venerable and still-very-much-working Hubble Space Telescope is set for October 10. It’ll be the last time a shuttle visits HST, and the repairs and updates will keep this observatory working for a bunch of years (hopefully until at the James Webb Space Telescope is deployed in the next decade).

I have a lot of thoughts about HST.  It was part of my life when I was in graduate school, and it helped sell my first book (Hubble Vision) and a planetarium show of the same name. HST’s images and data have been seen around the world, and I’m sure they’ve piqued the curiosity of millions of folks who have seen them.

It was 18 years ago (as I’ve mused in other posts) that HST was first launched and we found out about the awful spherical aberration that plagued its mirror. The recovery of the telescope and the subsequent darned fine science it has turned out in the meantime is one of the great triumphs of astronomy.

There are some darned fine people who will service the telescope to make it “good to go” for the next few years. Among them is John Grunsfeld, who is one of the nicest guys in the astronaut corps. He fought for this servicing mission, and he will be sticking his head into HST’s service bay again in October. Getting to meet and know John a little has been one of the great personal legacies that HST represents for me. I was in awe of his work, and it totally blew me away when he showed up at an AAS meeting once and told me that he’d read Hubble Vision to prepare for his first servicing mission. When I showed up at NASA Johnson Space Flight center for a tour, he personally escorted us, and had a copy of that book waiting for me to autograph.  That was damned cool and impressive.

Personal stories aside, however, I think that HST represents a major leap forward in our exploration of the cosmos. It set a clear path for all observatories (both ground-based AND space-based) that have followed. I look forward to seeing HST images and data for years and years to come!