A few years ago, George Bush was ready to pull the plug on the Hubble Space Telescope in order to spend more money fucking things up in Iraq on other priorities, but the hue and cry were so fierce that eventually the administration gave in and agreed to support Hubble a little while longer. So NASA has a mission in the works to do one last major maintenance and upgrade job that will keep the telescope operational for a couple of years beyond the projected end-of-life date of 2011. Among the upgrades will be a new spectrograph instrument and a new wide-field camera that will improve the power of the telescope 90 times. The Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, has tons of details that were announced at the American Astronomy Society meeting he’s attending this week, along with his own notes about Hubble and its forthcoming replacement, the Webb Space Telescope. He also has a lot to say about a briefing he heard from the current head of NASA, Mike Griffin, about financial and political realities and decision-making within the organization.
