Posted: Tue, Aug 10, 2004, 10:43 AM ET (1443 GMT)
NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe announced Monday that the agency would move ahead with plans to carry out a robotic repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. O'Keefe, speaking to staff at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said that he has instructed the agency to put together a repair mission using ideas taken from a number of proposals submitted to NASA earlier this year. The robotic mission would be charged with providing new gyros and batteries for the aging telescope, as well as potentially replacing two scientific instruments. The mission may take three years to develop and is expected to coast at least $1 billion, and perhaps up to $1.6 billion. A amendment to the proposed 2005 NASA budget will be sent to Congress in the near future that will request funding to start the work. The decision is somewhat at odds with an interim report released last month by the National Academies, which concluded that a repair mission was worthwhile but the state of the art in robotics was not sophisticated enough to carry out a repair mission. That report advocated keeping open the option of restoring the shuttle servicing mission that NASA canceled earlier this year, although NASA had been adamant that a shuttle mission to Hubble would not be safe enough.

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