spacetoday.net: NASA selects astronomy mission proposals for study

Posted: Sun, Aug 1, 2004, 9:01 PM ET (0101 GMT)
NASA announced last week that it has selected nine proposals for future astronomy missions, including one that would reuse instruments originally intended for the Hubble Space Telescope. The nine mission concepts were among 26 mission proposals submitted to NASA for its Astronomical Search for Origins Program. The missions are designed to carry out research that would complement or support work performed by current and future larger missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. One of the nine proposals, the Hubble Origins Probe, would use two instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, originally planned for use on the Hubble Space Telescope. The fate of the completed instruments became uncertain when NASA announced plans earlier this year to cancel the final shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, when those instruments would have been installed. The selected missions will get eight months to refine their proposals, although NASA gave no indication of how many, if any, missions the agency will select to fly, or when.