NASA Goddard
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating in Earth orbit since 1990, providing some of the best images and data about space ever captured. It’s now the target of an experiment to extend the life of artificial satellites.
NASA, the primary space agency of the United States, and SpaceX, a space launch provider, have announced a new partnership to study the feasibility of boosting the Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit using the Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX. Hubble has been visited by spacecraft five times already for repairs and servicing, but each previous mission was carried out by astronauts on the Space Shuttle, which is no longer available.
The plans are still in the early stages, and right now it’s more of a model for other servicing missions than a firm plan specifically for Hubble. NASA said in a blog post, “SpaceX — in partnership with the Polaris Program — proposed this study to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions. This study is non-exclusive, and other companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model.”
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