Hubble is as powerful as ever, especially since the final space shuttle maintenance flight of May 2009. “Unless something breaks or Hubble is hit by a meteorite, we expect it to be operational well beyond 2020,” says Kenneth Sembach, Hubble’s mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). When the space telescope eventually dies, the plan is to attach a propulsion module to its back end, to enable a controlled atmospheric re-entry above the Pacific Ocean (instead of letting it make its own, less predictable way down to Earth).
Hopefully, by then Hubble will have been working for a couple of years with its infrared successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due for launch in late 2018. But, says cosmologist Ivo Labbe (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands), “Even though…