What could spell the death of Hubble?
Without the upcoming STS-125 mission, Hubble is one failure away (the data handling unit they revived last fall) from being space junk. With it, it has a good chance of going at least through 2014, but some of the repaired gear will be single string only. So that can fail. Even a wayward space rock or orbital trash could pose a real, and unexpected threat down the road. Is this really NASA’s final service call to Hubble or could a future spacecraft like Orion attempt some type of flight? From what the mission scientists said, this really is the last call. Orion won’t be in place until no earlier than 2015, and Hubble is meant to be serviced every three years (this is the longest it has gone – seven years – without servicing). They also haven’t commissioned any new parts and those would take awhile to build if they did want to send anything new up there. Looking to the future, how will Hubble be decommissioned? Will they capture it and return it to Earth when it is finally ready to be t
