Taylor to continue fight for Hubble
Following NASA's announcement Monday that it will scrap plans to re-service the Hubble Space Telescope, physics professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Taylor called the decision "a great pity for astronomy."The decision came despite the unanimous recommendation from a 20-member NASA assessment committee ? of which Taylor was a member ? that the Hubble be serviced."NASA in particular, the agency that had commissioned the study and the report, decided that it didn't like the recommendations and has not followed the advice that we provided," Taylor said."Consequently, the president's budget does not have funding in it for the Hubble servicing."Taylor, who won the 1993 Noble Prize in Physics for his discovery of a new type of pulsar, said he was surprised by the announcement's timing.Sean O'Keefe, a NASA administrator who recently resigned, has been outspoken in criticizing the report on the grounds that the proposed mission would be too risky."I thought that they'd wait until a new administrator was chosen before making a decision," Taylor said.Acknowledging safety concerns, he said NASA is performing comparably dangerous operations, such as flights to the International Space Station."Our committee pointed out that the difference between safety issues of fixing Hubble and each trip to the International Space Station was very small, and that there was clearly a big difference between the safety of 25 missions to the space station as opposed to one to Hubble," he said.The cost of the job has also been a thorny issue.A National Academy of Sciences committee led by Taylor recommended that the Hubble be serviced.