By Ron Cowen
After several years of uncertainty following the Columbia shuttle disaster, NASA this week gave the go-ahead for a shuttle mission to replace and repair parts on the 16-year-old Hubble Space Telescope and install new detectors that would vastly improve the capabilities of the aging observatory.
“This is fantastic news,” says Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. “We’re getting a completely new telescope.”