Hubble Space Telescope

NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin gave the go-ahead for a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope on Tuesday, declaring the goal of saving one of the space agency's most popular science missions to be worth the risk of a shuttle flight. The mission would launch as early as May 2008, carrying new cameras, batteries and gyroscopes. Hubble is operating on only two of six gyroscopes and battery power is running down.

The president has crafted a budget that does not fund the long-planned final repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. Congress now faces a historic decision: If money is not restored to fix Hubble, then one of the world's most productive scientific instruments will forever close its eye on the universe. What is at stake is not only a piece of stellar technology but our commitment to the most fundamental human quest: understanding the cosmos.

Although the space shuttle's Tuesday touchdown eased some of NASA's worst fears, the problems that led to an indefinitely grounded shuttle fleet have only ratcheted up the anxiety of researchers over the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Greyhound bus-sized telescope, launched in 1990 after a lengthy delay following the Challenger shuttle disaster, has been praised by Stony Brook University professor Ken Lanzetta as "pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to astronomy."

In a gambit calculated to add eight months to the life of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have shut down one of the telescope's gyroscopes. The Hubble is now operating on two gyros, something its designers never imagined. By idling the third gyro, engineers and astronomers hope to buy more time for shuttle astronauts to reach the observatory with new gyros, fresh batteries and new scientific instruments.

Astronomers aided by the Hubble Space Telescope have spied two more rings encircling Uranus, the first additions to the planet's ring system in nearly two decades. The faint, dusty rings orbit outside of Uranus' previously known rings, but within the orbits of its large moons, said Mark Showalter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who made the discovery. Details appeared online Friday in the journal Science.

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a mosaic of photos that includes more than 40,000 galaxies in a patch of sky about the size of the full moon. The study, combining 78 separate exposures by the Hubble, gives astronomers a wide sampling of many galaxies that could be used to study how the massive groupings of stars originate, change shape and move together in clusters. Eric F.

The Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to degrade and eventually become useless, as NASA changes focus to President Bush's plans to send humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, officials said Friday. NASA canceled all space shuttle servicing missions to the Hubble, which has revolutionized the study of astronomy with its striking images of the universe.

Responding to protests over plans to send the Hubble Space Telescope to an early death, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe said he had asked for a high-profile second opinion. O'Keefe said he asked retired Adm. Harold Gehman, who led the independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster, for his thoughts on NASA's decision not to service the orbiting telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of a distant planet, the first such find around a world outside our solar system, scientists said. Unlike Earth, the planet is a hot, gassy orb very close to its sun-like star, and the oxygen and carbon are not signs of any sort of life, Hubble scientists said. Still, astronomers said the findings show that the composition of the atmospheres of planets far away can be measured.

The deepest view of the universe, a photo by the Hubble Space Telescope that looks back to the edge of the big bang, shows a chaotic scramble of odd galaxies smashing into each other and re-forming in bizarre shapes. The snapshot, called the Ultra Deep Field, captured light that had streaked through space for more than 13 billion years, starting its journey when the universe was only 5% of its 13.7-billion-year age.