I’m always reluctant to post about Hubble and my work at the Space Telescope Science Institute, largely because I am not any sort of leading engineer or astronomer on the project.  I am merely one of the support Nibelung down in the software engineering services branch.  A happy Nibelung, if such a thing is possible, yes.  When they offered me the job at Space Telescope I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  But I cannot possibly speak for the Institute on anything that’s news breaking.  You are far better off getting it from our public outreach people then me.  They see the whole picture.  I can only see my little part of it.

But I have family and friends who are expressing some concern about Hubble, in light of the news that we’ve lost one of the really good Hubble cameras, the Advanced Camera for Surveys.  Well…actually we’ve only lost two channels of it, the Wide Field channel and the High Resolution channel.  There is still the Solar Blind channel, which I’m hearing now they expect to get back online eventually.

What you need to remember is that we still have NICMOS, and WFPC2.  The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has brought us many wonderful images, including the famous "Pillars of Creation" image from the Eagle Nebula.  The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer has been used to penetrate deep into the heart of star forming regions, revealing features connected with the process of star formation.

So Hubble is still very much a capable telescope.  And NASA is committed to our Servicing Mission 4, which is currently scheduled for September of 2008.  SM4 will give Hubble a new and improved Wide Field Camera, which the folks at the Institute are expecting to be will essentially be an even more sophisticated successor to ACS. 

Space is a hostile environment, and you have to expect that even our best, most ruggedly built instruments will take hits that do serious damage the longer their missions go on.  But Hubble has kept plugging away, thanks in large part to our astronauts who have done such a wonderful job keeping our telescope healthy and up to date.  They’re going to give it one more service call and that, I’m afraid, will be it.  But the expectation is that Hubble will, after that servicing mission, give us many more years of breathtaking science.  Hopefully the James Webb space telescope will be in place to continue in Hubble’s footsteps, when Hubble’s mission is over. 

At the moment they’re busy juggling around the projects the science community wants to do on Hubble.  Obviously things that depended on ACS’s two lost channels can’t go forward for now.  But other research will fill in the gaps and when the new instruments are installed many things that were postponed can go forward I’m sure.  Even with the loss of most of ACS, Hubble will still be very, very busy between now and SM4.  We all still have much to look forward to.