End of the Line for Hubble?

Astronomers ponder space telescope's final years

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.