Ben Cardin: “since 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope, HST, has inspired scientists and students' alike. Unlike ground-based telescopes…”

“since 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope, HST, has inspired scientists and students' alike. Unlike ground-based telescopes, HST is uninhibited by the Earth's atmosphere and therefore uniquely suited to capture images from distant space with high image clarity. HST allows us to look further back in time to the universe's earliest days. By design, the Hubble Telescope requires regular servicing missions. These missions have occurred in 1993, 1997, 1999, and 2002, and the mission scheduled for 2004 was postponed after the Columbia Shuttle tragedy. Servicing missions allow us to repair broken parts of the telescope and to add additional components that improve viewing abilities by ten degrees or more. Our next servicing mission would repair three faulty gyroscopes that failed in April 2003. Without this mission, HST will continue to operate in degraded mode. There is only a 50 percent chance that HST will be in operation past March 2007 without a servicing mission. Beyond 2007, the chance for continued operation of HST declines significantly. On January 16, 2004 former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe informed workers at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (which built Hubble and oversees STScI) that he was canceling SM-4, a Hubble Servicing mission, because the shuttle would not have the International Space Station as a safe haven.…”