| Subject: Failure to repair Hubble could be against the law |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 17:26:06 03/29/05 Tue
Astronomers and an American senator renewed calls on Wednesday for a repair mission to Nasa's ageing Hubble Space Telescope, even though the Bush administration's proposed budget would see it die in orbit.
Senetor Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat whose state is home to the Space Telescope Science Institute and Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, told the space agency that a failure to keep working toward a mission to fix Hubble could be against the law.
In a letter to Frederick Gregory, Nasa's acting administrator, Mikulski noted that Congress appropriated $291-million (about R2-billion) for fiscal 2005 for a Hubble servicing mission.
"I expect Nasa to carry out Congress' intent and spend the entire amount appropriated this year so there will be no interruption in the planning, preparation and engineering work that will be necessary for a servicing mission to Hubble," she wrote.
The Bush administration's proposed 2006 budget requested only $93-million (about R550-million) for the Hubble programme, with $75-million (about R450-million) of that set aside to bring the orbiting observatory safely to Earth.
The Hubble is overdue for repairs and upgrading, and in the past has been fixed by shuttle astronauts. But the shuttle fleet has been grounded since the Columbia disaster on February 1 2003 and former Nasa chief Sean O'Keefe said repeatedly he would not risk lives to fix the telescope.
A professional organisation of US astronomers added its voice on Wednesday to those taking issue with Nasa's decision.
"The Hubble Space Telescope has been the crown jewel in Nasa's science programmes for more than a decade," the American Astronomical Society said in a statement.
The fact that the repair mission had already been planned and new scientific instruments developed for Hubble "makes this decision particularly unfortunate and difficult to accept," the group said.
The big winners in Nasa's proposed budget are the shuttle programme - slated to return to flight in May - along with the International Space Station and a plan to develop a vehicle to replace the shuttle.
This is in line with President George Bush's plan to return Americans to the moon and eventually send them to Mars.
Even as Hubble's fate was debated, scientists using data gathered by the old craft reported that they had discovered an upper weight limit for stars.
Previously, astronomers had theorised that the heaviest stars might range up to 1 000 times the mass of our sun. But the latest research indicates that stars cannot get any larger than about 150 solar masses.
To get this result, scientists studied Hubble data from the Arches star cluster, about 25 000 light-years from Earth in the hub of the Milky Way. A light-year is about six trillion (10 trillion kilometres), the distance light travels in a year.
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