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Sometime in the next few weeks NASA will make a decision about whether to fly a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Without maintence, the Hubble will die.

But saving it puts a shuttle crew at a risk NASA has not wanted to take. 

Hubble sees the places where stars are born and die.  It has stared into the galactic canvas and told us the age of the universe.

“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to assert that Hubble has really helped to completely rewrite our understanding of the universe,” astronaut Steve Hawley.

Hawley was one of the first to see Hubble in space and then returned to upgrade it.

“The beauty of what is out there, and the discoveries that are out there I think people can relate to just from looking at the picture and how beautiful it is,” astronaut Mike Massimino said.

Massimino was among the last to see it. 

On that last mission to Hubble, astronauts rode aboard Columbia, the very orbiter whose loss could keep any crew from going back.

“You have to be really careful around the telescope,” Massimino said. “The difficult part of it is that you have to be very very delicate.”

While a Hubble mission is of itself complicated, the issue for NASA is that the  telescope is in a different part of the sky from the International Space Station.

AP

The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit.

In a crisis there would be no shelter at ISS.

Astronauts would fix their own problem or perhaps wait for possible rescue. 

Not everybody who wants to save Hubble has actually been there.  In fact some of the telescope’s biggest supporters are researchers around the world.

Among them is a Rice University researcher who studies globular clusters, millions of stars that may be some of the oldest things in the galaxy.

NASA

Hubble has fed back thousands of amazing images.

“They are all orbiting eachother like bees around the hive,” researcher Jay Anderson said. “The Hubble is pretty much one of the only instruments that can see to the center of this beehive.”

Ninety-five percent of his work depends on Hubble.

Within weeks NASA must decide: Repair it or let it die.

“In the end it will be my decision,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin said.

Should the NASA administrator decide his answer is go there will be volunteers, astronauts who believe the life of Hubble is worth risking their own lives to save.

“I think this is one where people just instinctively feel like the benefit is worth the risk,” Hawley said.