Hubble Saved!
For now, anyway:
Administrator Michael Griffin announced a daring space shuttle flight to repair and upgrade the 16-year-old telescope in the spring of 2008 — a reversal of the previous NASA chief, who chose to let the orbiting telescope die because of safety concerns for astronauts after the shuttle Columbia disaster.
The $900 million rehab mission, carried out in five astronaut spacewalks from the shuttle Discovery, should permit the telescope to keep taking pictures until 2013, allowing scientists to gaze even deeper into the beginnings of the cosmos.
I'm no fan of ongoing shuttle missions, but if they're going to be launching the thing anyway, I'm glad they've decided to breathe some more life into Hubble. We've been calling for this for some time now.
Here's to a few more years of getting images like these.