Heidi Hammel, a Senior Research Scientist from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, expresses her views on the past, present, and future of the Hubble Space Telescope and its upcoming repair mission.

Shortly after NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced that NASA would add a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, Hubble’s most prominent camera and most used instrument, died. Goddard Engineers leveraged techniques they developed for STIS repair to fix ACS.

STIS was our first black hole hunter. It confirmed for the first time the existence of a super massive black hole in the center of a galaxy. And it went on to make the first detection and chemical analysis of the atmosphere of a planet around another star. We want to want to keep on doing that...