By Ron Cowen
Black Friday. That’s how Steve Beckwith, director of the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute and his colleagues refer to Jan. 16, 2004, the day that the Hubble Space Telescope got its death sentence. Sean O’Keefe, a NASA Administrator, handed down the judgment to Beckwith and about 100 other Hubble scientists and engineers in a conference room above Hubble’s flight operations center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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Citing safety concerns that had come to light after the Columbia space shuttle tragedy in February 2003, O’Keefe told the gathering that NASA wasn’t going to send any more shuttle missions to upgrade or repair the orbiting observatory. With its 3-decades-old batteries in danger of petering out and its spacecraft-stabilizing gyroscopes vulnerable to failure, the telescope could cease to function as early as 2007. Scientists had hoped to use shuttle missions to maintain it until as late as 2013.