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United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should push ahead to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope rather than let it die in orbit as the space agency proposed earlier this year, according to a National Research Council panel's interim findings released today. The committee, chaired by Louis Lanzerotti of Bell Labs and Newark's New Jersey Institute of Technology, comes down strongly in favor of a comprehensive Hubble rescue mission, and urges NASA to consider both a robotic flight or a shuttle rendezvous to replace operational systems such as batteries as well as scientific instruments. NASA Administrator Sean O' Keefe announced in January that the Hubble would no longer be serviced.

The article presents a picture of the universe. It is part of the Ultra Deep Field image snapped by Hubble, an orbiting telescope owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), America's space agency. The length of the exposure allowed galaxies more than 13 billion light years away to be photographed. The redder a galaxy appears in the picture, the further away it is. This is due to the Doppler effect, which causes the light from receding objects to be shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. A pity, then, that NASA has decided to stop servicing Hubble, and to let the spacecraft die.