Looks like it might be time to say goodbye to a famous piece of technology, the Hubble telescope. Reuters has the story:
The aging Hubble Space Telescope -- a path-breaking scientific instrument whose eye-catching images have won fans around the world -- would die in orbit under the 2006 budget for NASA proposed on Monday.
The U.S. space agency's total budget would rise 2.4 percent over 2005 to about $16.5 billion, but only $93 million would be spent on Hubble, with $75 million of that aimed at bringing the observatory down to Earth safely, NASA's comptroller said.
"Hubble is a spacecraft that is dying," Comptroller Steve Isakowitz said at a briefing in advance of the budget's release. "We have decided that the risks associated with the Hubble servicing at this time don't merit going forward."
Despite its false start, Hubble has managed to illuminate all kinds of things from the heavens for us - Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter, the existence of dark matter and evidence of planets in other solar systems.
Of course, NASA's been planning on replacing Hubble with the James Webb Space Telescope for some time, but our man in the know says that it's actually vast improvements in land-based telescope technology that have done for it... perhaps space-based scopes just don't cut it any more.
