BBC News: Hubble service mission funding scrapped

The Hubble Space Telescope and a mission to explore Jupiter's moons look to be the biggest casualties in Nasa's 2006 budget plans outlined on Monday.

Under the proposals, a mission to service Hubble would be scrapped and the telescope left to die in orbit.

Nasa's total budget would rise 2.4% over 2005 to about $16.5bn, but only $93m would be spent on Hubble.

About $75m of that will be aimed at bringing the observatory down to Earth safely, officials have announced.

The US space agency (Nasa) has fared better than many government agencies in President George Bush's 2006 budget request. But the White House is not seeking as much money for the space agency as had previously been planned - and that is bad news for Hubble.

Chance of reprieve

"Hubble is a spacecraft that is dying," Nasa comptroller Steve Isakowitz said at a briefing in advance of the budget's release.

"We have decided that the risks associated with the Hubble servicing at this time don't merit going forward."

This will infuriate Hubble supporters who believe the telescope still has good years of science observation ahead of it - provided it is serviced.

They will hope Congress, which has to approve the budget, will insist on money being found to save the orbiting observatory.

"There is a long history of Congress putting into the Nasa budget what Nasa or the executive branch don't like and have taken out," said Rodger Thompson, a University of Arizona astronomer and principal investigator of the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (Nicmos), which astronauts placed on Hubble in 1997.

"The Gravity Probe-B was cancelled many times and each time was put back in the budget by Congress.

"There is going to be a large debate about this and there is a significant chance that funding for Hubble will be returned to the budget," he told the BBC News website.

Safety considerations

In December, a panel of experts concluded that astronauts would do the best job of servicing Hubble and rejected proposals for a robotic rescue mission.

Outgoing Nasa administrator Sean O'Keefe said the decision over Hubble had been influenced by this decision and the commitment to meeting the safety reccommendations of the Columbia accident investigation board.

"Even if we could do [a robotic mission], we probably could not deploy that capability in enough time," administrator O'Keefe told reporters at Nasa HQ in Washington DC.

"It is difficult to see how any mission to service Hubble that would meet the recommendations of the Columbia accident investigation board."

He reaffirmed that the space agency continued to be guided by President Bush's vision for space exploration, announced in January 2004.

This has included a major shift in emphasis towards human exploration, with the intention of returning astronauts to the Moon and, possibly, take them on to Mars.

The multi-billion dollar Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo) mission was to have been launched in about 2015 as a demonstration for the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion initiative.

It would have gone into orbit around the giant planet and its moons, possibly putting landers on their surfaces in much the same way as Cassini has done with Huygens on Titan.

Nasa officials now say Jimo is too ambitious an undertaking for an initial demonstration project, and a search for an alternative mission is underway.

"These big missions always have ups and downs," commented Professor Fred Taylor, from Oxford University, UK, and a scientist on the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990s.

"At this stage it was always just a study - and when approved missions get cancelled, then one should really get upset.

"If the alternative is a cheaper mission that would go more quickly, we might get more science faster. If the current study is uncovering a serious viability problem then we might be better off backing off and looking for other solutions," he told BBC News.

It's a sad day for Astronomers today

BB

Very true Bart, not unexpected though. Once HST goes down to 2 gyros (of which there is a 50-50 chance in the next 12 months), expect is to last at max 12 months beyond that before a deorbit attempt.

The SOHO satellite lost all 3 gyros yet scientists were able to regain control of it and it's working fine now (apart from the CCD bakeout issue which is completely unrelated).

I wonder will they be able to do something similar for Hubble :

The SOHO satellite lost all 3 gyros yet scientists were able to regain control of it and it's working fine now (apart from the CCD bakeout issue which is completely unrelated).

I wonder will they be able to do something similar for Hubble :

Probably not Mike. I presume the gyros on SOHO (launched in 1995) are newer than Hubble (launched in 1990 - 5 years earlier). SOHO was probably designed to maintain istelf, as it is impossible to service from here. Hubble, on the otherhand, is serviceable, so I presume it was cheaper to build etc.

But I could be (and probably am) wrong!

Seanie.

Do remember that when NASA's Compton gamma-ray observatory went down to two gyros, a decision was made to deorbit - a decision which went down like a lead balloon, as you may imagine. The fear on the part of NASA was that the observatory would be rendered uncontrollable if any further gyros were lost, and so as a preemtive strike, CGRO was plunged into the Pacific. The same arguments would be made with Hubble.

As for the argument with respect to SOHO, given that it's all the way out at L1 and is dynamically stable, and the nature of the gyro problem (which was worked around), the same problems do not apply. If Hubble's gyros goes, that's it.