GOOD NEWS ON THE PURE SCIENCE FRONT IS RARE THESE DAYS. In January, NASA said that it would discontinue space-shuttle based maintenance of the Hubble Space Telescope. (Gregg Easterbrook has made convincing arguments for twenty-plus years for why the space shuttle project should be abandoned in its entirety, but that's another conversation.) So it is with some relief and joy that we hear that NASA will in fact continue to maintain the Hubble with robotic missions. The Hubble, of course, has been hailed as one of the single greatest tools ever for expanding our cosmological knowledge, so it would have been sad indeed to watch it fall into dilapidation.
- posted by thegusdad @ 8/10/2004 10:54:00 AM