Repairing Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope will undergo its fifth and final servicing mission in the spring of 2009, postponed from an earlier date of August 2008. The mission will add two new advanced pieces of equipment that will allow the observatory to peer even deeper into the cosmos. Technology Review spoke with Jeffery Hoffman, a professor of astronautics at MIT and a former astronaut who helped install the Wide Field Camera 2 during a Hubble servicing mission in 1993, about the challenges with the next mission and why it’s important to keep Hubble afloat.

Video by Brittany Sauser, images courtesy of NASA