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| Credit:NASA |
To examine the viability of a SpaceX and Polaris Program concept to launch the agency's Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit with the Dragon spacecraft, at no expense to the government, NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement on Thursday, September 22.
The study is intended to assist the agency in comprehending the commercial opportunities; NASA has no intentions to perform or fund a servicing mission or compete for this opportunity.
This study was proposed by SpaceX in collaboration with the Polaris Program to better understand the technological difficulties involved in servicing missions. Other businesses may suggest comparable experiments using different rockets or spacecraft as their basis; this study is not exclusive.
Technical data will be gathered for the study from both Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon mission, and teams anticipate it to take up to six months. This information will be used to assess whether it would be safe to dock, rendezvous, and transfer the telescope to a more stable orbit.
Thomas Zurbuchen, assistant administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, stated that this study is a fascinating illustration of the cutting-edge strategies NASA is investigating through private-public collaborations. "As our fleet expands, we want to investigate a variety of options to provide the most robust, outstanding science missions we can."
Despite the fact that Hubble and Dragon will serve as test models for this investigation, parts of the mission idea may also be applicable to other spacecraft, especially those in the same low-Earth-orbit as Hubble.
Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has been operating 335 miles above Earth in a slowly eroding orbit. Reboosting Hubble into a higher, more stable orbit could extend its operational life by several years.
NASA intends to safely de-orbit or destroy Hubble at the end of its operational life.
According to Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX, "SpaceX and the Polaris Program seek to push the limits of current technology and investigate how commercial partnerships may imaginatively solve hard, complicated challenges." "Missions like repairing Hubble would help us increase our space capabilities and ultimately aid all of us in achieving our aims of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary society,"
