HEPL Seminar - Hubble Robotic Servicing - Recent Engineering Development

Speaker: Bill Reeve, Civil Space Director of Advanced Science Programs, Lockheed Martin. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been described as the second greatest telescope ever developed, the first being Galileos. Launched in 1989, HST's great success as a science observatory has been due, at least in part, to its upgradeability. Hubble has been successfully serviced three times by the space shuttle. Concerns for astronaut safely, combined with a strong national desire to maintain the HST observatory, has motivated NASA to propose a robotic servicing and de-orbit mission to HST. Robotic servicing in space has the potential to be a breakthrough technology enabling many future science and exploration missions.