Laatste onderhoudsbeurt Hubble

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Het einde van de levensduur van de Hubble komt nu echt in zicht.
Na de huidige missie van de space shuttle komen nog acht andere missies,
en die zijn allemaal gereserveerd voor het International Space Station.
Een opvolger voor de space shuttle is nog niet echt in zicht, dus hebben
de Russen met de Soyuz het enige alternatief in handen.
In de nabije toekomst kunnen wellicht de Indiase ISRO Orbital Vehicle,
maar nog waarschijnlijker de Chinese Shenzhou een rol spelen. De Shenzhou
is immers geënt op de Soyuz ;)

Groet / Cees

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/05/11/ST2009051103679.html
Hubble Mission Opens Shuttle's Last Act
Aging, Flawed Space Vehicle Still Has Its Fans

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 12, 2009

CAPE CANAVERAL, May 11 -- Almost overlooked in the hoopla over Monday's
launch of the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope has
been another piece of gee-whiz space technology that will soon be only a
museum exhibit: the space shuttle.

There are only nine shuttle missions left, including the one that started
when Atlantis blasted off through a thin layer of clouds drifting high
above the Kennedy Space Center. Astronauts plan to latch onto the Hubble
on Wednesday and then, early Thursday, begin a series of spacewalks in
which they will replace, and in some cases repair on the spot, many of the
telescope's scientific instruments.

The remainder of the shuttle flights will be to the international space
station, with the final mission scheduled for late 2010. The Hubble
mission is thus one of the shuttle's last hurrahs, and nothing quite like
it will happen again any time soon.

The Hubble was dreamed up in the 1970s at the same time as the space
shuttle program, and the telescope and the space truck have always been
symbiotic. No other space telescope gets serviced by astronauts. NASA
currently has a dozen of them in orbit, many of them in orbits far from
where the shuttle can fly. They were not designed with the thought that
anyone would ever show up to fix them.

"Hubble was lucky," said Edward Weiler, NASA's head of space science, who
has worked on the Hubble project since 1978. The shuttle, he said, "gave
you an infrastructure that was there and was frankly free to the science
side."

The senior project scientist for Hubble, David Leckrone, who started on
the telescope in 1976, said, "The dream was that Hubble would be similar
to mountaintop telescopes." The greatest mountaintop telescopes last for
decades. The Hubble made that concept come true in space.

But other space telescopes have been designed for just

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