NASA to announce Hubble's Fate on Tuesday

Chances are apparently bright to turn the aging U.S. Hubble Space Telescope into the brand new observatory, but the final decision will be taken on Tuesday by the NASA managers.

NASA’s plan for a big announcement came after key officials on Friday met for three hours to account the value and risks of sending space shuttle to repair the Hubble telescope, extending its life for some more years.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin will announce the decision on Tuesday. The announcement is slated for 10 a.m. EST during an agency-wide employee meeting from NASA's first space flight center, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

If the decision gets the green light for repair, Hubble, the first major optical telescope placed in space, would get serviced for the fifth time in its 16-year lifetime. And, in the servicing process astronauts would replace the telescope's spent batteries and stabilizing gyroscopes as well as install two new science instruments. The rehab mission would also add new guidance sensors and repair a light-separating spectrograph, which stopped functioning in August 2004, NASA spokesman Ed Campion, said.

Scientists say the replacement of the faulty equipments could keep the largest visible-light observatory, ever placed into space, functioning until at least 2013. But, without a servicing call, Hubble's batteries could fail as soon as 2008 and the gyroscopes inactive a year later, Matt Mountain, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) said.

The Baltimore, Maryland-based STScI manages and directs research done with the popular orbital observatory, Hubble Space Telescope.

The rehab move would turn the aging optical observatory into "a brand new observatory," Mountain said.

Since its launch in 1990, scientists have used Hubble to observe the most distant stars and galaxies as well as the planets in the solar system. Since then, the telescope has made nearly 93,500 trips around our planet, racking up almost 2.4 billion miles.

Less than three years ago, the US space agency had planned the fifth servicing call to the telescope, but had to cancel the plan after 2003 Columbia disaster that killed all seven astronauts.

After getting revitalized, the Hubble’s equipment would allow the observatory to peer into the vast space and to map better images of the earliest galaxies and planets orbiting nearby stars.