Astronauts could visit the Hubble Space Telescope again one day, this time on a private spacecraft.
Hubble launched into Earth orbit in April 1990 and received five groups of visitors over the next two decades. These crews of astronauts, who arrived on NASA’s Space Shuttle missions, repeatedly repaired, maintained and improved the iconic scope, allowing it to continue to observe the skies with groundbreaking clarity to this day.
NASA withdrew its spaceship fleet in 2011, but a new era of Hubble servicing missions may be about to dawn. The agency announced today (29 September) that it is carrying out a joint study with SpaceX consider sending a Dragon capsule to Hubble, to boost the observatory’s orbit and perhaps help it in other ways as well.
Related: NASA Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions (photos)
“We want to benefit Hubble. And if benefiting from Hubble means not only the booster, but also providing services, and that can be done with a human spaceflight mission, so much the better,” Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, said at a press conference today. “So everything is on the table.”
To be clear: no SpaceX mission to Hubble is currently underway. The new announcement is for a feasibility study, which is expected to last six months and does not involve any funding from NASA. (The agency participates through an unfunded Space Act agreement.)
“We are going to watch Dragon capabilities and how they would need to be modified in order to safely get to and dock with Hubble,” Jensen said. view of the trajectory – that’s all to be worked out.”
And a Hubble Dragon mission, if it came to fruition, wouldn’t necessarily need a crew, she added. The feasibility study could direct planners towards an unmanned mission, with Dragon or perhaps even another type of vehicle.
Hubble is in good health and continues to return amazing and informative photos of the cosmos. The other day, for example, he took pictures of the Didymos asteroid system shortly after NASA’s DART probe intentionally slammed into one of its two constituent space rocks.
But Hubble’s orbit has deteriorated quite a bit over the past 33 years due to atmospheric drag. The telescope is currently zooming around Earth at an altitude of about 335 miles (540 kilometers), about 38 miles (60 km) lower than its original orbit.
At its current altitude, Hubble has a 50% chance of falling back to Earth in 2037, said Patrick Crouse, Hubble project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, during today’s briefing.
NASA won’t let it come to that, though; the agency plans to deorbit Hubble in a controlled manner once its observing days are over. This will require launch a robotic mission to the telescope to lower it safely. NASA would likely aim to launch the deorbit mission by the late 2020s, Crouse said.
But that’s without orbit boost. Returning Hubble to its original altitude of 373 miles (600 km) could potentially allow the observatory to continue operating for many years to come.
“You would easily add 15 to maybe 20 years of orbital life to the mission if you could get to that altitude,” Crouse said.
If the feasibility study yields promising results, a Dragon mission to Hubble could be launched sooner than you think. Indeed, there is already an architecture in place that could accommodate such a flight – the Polaris program, a set of three SpaceX missions organized and led by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who commissioned the story. inspiration4 Earth orbit mission last year.
Related: SpaceX’s historic Inspiration4 mission in photos
Polaris will consist of three missions, the first of which, polar dawnwill send Isaacman and three crewmates into orbit in a Dragon as early as March 2023. This flight will feature the first-ever private spacewalk and will send Dragon farther from Earth than any crewed mission since the Apollo time.
The second and third Polaris missions remain relatively undefined at this time, although we know that Polaris 2 will fly on a Dragon and that Polaris 3 will employ Spatialshipthe massive vehicle SpaceX is developing to take people to the Moon and Mars.
The Polaris program aims to demonstrate and advance manned spaceflight capabilities. And a trip to Hubble would fit that bill perfectly, according to Isaacman.
“Certainly the idea of boosting and servicing Hubble, if the feasibility study supported it, would be, you know, a logical second mission,” he said during today’s briefing.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or on Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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