May 13, 2005

NASA plans to fix the Hubble, but postpones other stuff

NASA is proceeding with plans to send a shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the ailing Hubble Telescope, reversing their previous decision to simply let the telescope die. The bad news is that funding the Hubble mission would mean the indefinite postponement of two future missions to search for extrasolar planets - the Space Interferometry Mission, which had been scheduled for 2011, and the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which was set to launch in 2014. It is also possible that the next rover mission to Mars, the Mars Science Laboratory, will be pushed back to from 2009 to 2011. Link.

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