NASA extends life of soon-to-be-succeeded Hubble Space Telescope by another 5 years

WASHINGTON (Web Desk) – The NASA has announced plans to extend operations of the space telescope Hubble for another five years.

According to details, NASA launched the telescope in 1990, there were few difficult repairs in back years. Its servicing took place in 2009.

NASA claimed that the telescope is still going strong.

“Hubble is expected to continue to provide valuable data into the 2020s, securing its place in history as an outstanding general-purpose observatory in areas ranging from our solar system to the distant universe,” said a NASA statement.

NASA launched Hubble’s h successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launches in 2018, giving astronomers a dual view of the universe.

Squeezing more life out of Hubble means it will overlap with NASA’s next big telescope, JWST when it launches in 2018. While Hubble sees the cosmos in visible and ultraviolet light, JWST operates in the infrared.

“It’s fantastic news, because we were never quite sure how long Hubble would last after the last service mission,” says regular Hubble user Boris Gänsicke at the University of Warwick, UK. “It will allow us to do science with the unique capabilities that both observatories have.”

Gänsicke says that he is particularly interested in studying the remains of planetary systems around spent stars known as white dwarfs.