Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope Letter Report (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Letter Report
Letter Report
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The additional information that you provided on NASA activities related to the shuttle return-to-flight program and robotic engineering in the broader context of long-term human space exploration was very useful, as was the extensive question-and-answer dialog that you enthusiastically engaged in with the committee. Because you and your NASA colleagues have made clear to the committee that there is some urgency in issuing any recommendations related to Hubble, we are providing you with this interim report.3 It offers three principal findings and recommendations.
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Much of Hubble's extraordinary impact was foreseen when the telescope was being planned. It was predicted, for example, that the space telescope would reveal massive black holes at the centers of nearby galaxies, measure the size and age of the observable universe, probe far enough back in time to capture galaxies soon after their formation, and provide crucial keys to the evolution of chemical elements within stars.
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RECOMMENDATION. The committee urges that NASA commit to a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that accomplishes the objectives of the originally planned SM-4 mission, including both the replacement of the present instruments with the two instruments already developed for flight -- the Wide Field Camera-3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph-and the engineering objectives, such as gyroscope and battery replacements.
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The committee finds the proposed robotic mission to be highly complex due to the inherent difficulties with supervised autonomy in the presence of time delays; the integration of vision and force feedback in six-degree-of-freedom assembly and disassembly tasks with high-degree-offreedom, dexterous manipulators; and the coordinated control of the high-inertia HRV8 with a long-reach robotic arm grappling with a high-inertia payload. Robotic emplacement of a deorbit module and replacement of instruments and subsystems on Hubble will require a rendezvous with a non-cooperative vehicle9 together with a human in a telerobotic loop that has a substantial (on the order of 2-second)
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You stressed that total elimination of risk in crewed space flight is "impossible" and that you and NASA are "not risk averse." From information it has received, including the risk information to date, the committee concludes that there would be little additional investment in time and resources required over the next year for NASA to keep open an option for a human servicing mission to Hubble. According to briefings received by the committee, the risk assessments for viable Hubble servicing alternatives, both human and robotic, have not yet been completed or reported by NASA.
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RECOMMENDATION. At the same time that NASA is vigorously pursuing development of robotic servicing capabilities, and until the agency has completed a more comprehensive examination of the engineering and technology issues, including risk assessments related to both robotic and human servicing options, NASA should take no actions that would preclude a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
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