
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 5, 1990                   TAG: 9007050042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ASTRONOMERS: REPAIRED HUBBLE WILL STAY FLAWED

NASA scientists are confident that they can repair the focusing flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope within the next three to six years, but it will never perform as intended.

Some of the projects planned for the telescope will be permanently shelved; others will be reduced in scope, and research will take as much as five times longer to complete, astronomers say.

And two of the five instruments on the telescope - the Faint Object Camera and the High Speed Photometer - are not scheduled for replacement, continuing to operate with significantly reduced capabilities for the rest of the mission.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is building a new Wide-Field Planetary Camera, the instrument intended to make 40 percent of the observations during the Hubble's 15-year mission, and expects to launch it in 1993, said Edward Weiler, the Hubble Space Telescope program scientist at NASA headquarters. The camera will be fitted with a mirror or lens that will compensate for the flaw discovered last week in one of the telescope's two mirrors.

Two other key instruments, also planned as backups, are in the design stages and will not be ready until 1996, Weiler said. The two, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectograph and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, will also be fitted with corrective mirrors or lenses, he said. He speculated the modifications to the mirrors will cost "tens of thousands."

NASA scientists said they hope to speed up construction of the replacement Wide-Field Planetary Camera by placing workers at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on double and triple shifts. Even so, the new camera could not be finished until mid-1992, Weiler said. The cost of increased manpower would be in "the millions," he said, adding that it would be absorbed within the Hubble telescope's budget.

One of the instruments that will not be replaced, the Faint Object Camera, which was supposed to help map the universe with high-resolution pictures of distant objects, was built by the European Space Agency as a cost-sharing measure. Weiler said he does not know if the Europeans want to build a replacement equipped with a corrective lens.

Scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University will be reviewing the projects planned for the Hubble in the next three weeks to see which are still viable.

by CNB