Mission options for Hubble costly

WASHINGTON – With the long-term fate of the Hubble Space Telescope still uncertain, several experts testified at a congressional hearing Wednesday about the range of options for extending its life.

U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee, declared himself “agnostic” on the issue, but said he wanted to open the latest segment of the debate with as much information as possible.

“We have to make hard choices about whether a Hubble mission is worth it now, when moving ahead is likely to have an adverse impact on other programs, including quite possibly other programs in astronomy,” Boehlert said.

NASA chief Sean O’Keefe scrapped a planned space shuttle mission to service the telescope a little more than a year ago. Since then, the agency has funded research and development of a possible robotic servicing mission and commissioned a study into whether a new, smaller instrument might be a good option.

But NASA is not expected to have funding for either project in its 2006 budget proposal, which will be released on Monday.

Without some kind of servicing, the groundbreaking telescope’s batteries and gyroscopes would decline enough to end science operations in 2007. The telescope is expected to fail completely in 2009.

Gary Pulliam, an official with Aerospace Corp., which studied the options for NASA, said the cost estimates for robotic servicing range from $1.3 billion to $2.2 billion. Just using a robot to deorbit the telescope – necessary to protect the public – could cost anywhere from $300 million to $1.1 billion.

A new craft, with different but similar instruments, would run about $2 billion, he said, including the cost of deorbiting the Hubble.

A National Academy of Sciences report released in December said the costs of a robotic mission are no less than a shuttle mission, and that astronauts have a better chance of success.

But Paul Cooper, whose company, MD Robotics, is developing the robotic mission, said the studies overestimated the costs and the risks of such a mission. The robotic capability is coming together quickly, he said.

“It’s not an aggressive schedule if you don’t assume you’re starting with a blank sheet of paper,” Cooper said. “In short, we can do this, and we think it’s the right thing to do.”

As for a new instrument – an option known as “rehosting” – it has promise but doesn’t solve the money problem, said Louis Lanzerotti, who chaired the National Academies study panel.

“It’s not clear to me that rehosting would involve significantly lower costs than a shuttle servicing mission,” he said.

In fact, Lanzerotti and some others on the panel couldn’t say for sure whether extending the life of the Hubble is worth delaying another astronomical project.

“As a scientist, I would say if the billion dollars were going to come out of some other NASA program … then I think I would have a severe problem with that,” Lanzerotti said.