This is good news.
NASA's final shuttle mission to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope has a firm September 2008 launch date, the space agency announced Thursday.
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Squeezed in between NASA's remaining shuttle flights to complete space station construction, the STS-125 mission to Hubble will extend the orbital observatory's lifetime through 2013. Without the vital servicing mission, Hubble's major science activities would likely end around 2009, with only basic functions remaining through 2011, Hubble managers have said.
Though it got off to a rocky start, the contributions of the Hubble telescope have advanced our knowledge of the universe in spectacular ways. It's nice to know it will keep serving us for several more years, so we can get more images like this:
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