Good News Regarding The Hubble Telescope

From MSNBC:

After years of debate, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin gave the go-ahead on Tuesday for what could be one of the space shuttle program's most dramatic missions: a final repair visit to the Hubble Space Telescope.

"We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle's manifest, to be flown before it retires," Griffin told agency employees here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The news was greeted with a standing ovation.

The service call is tentatively scheduled for launch no earlier than May 2008, with Discovery as the designated shuttle, Griffin said. The mission would be aimed at keeping the orbiting observatory, which has provided thousands of dazzling pictures of the cosmos during its 16 years in orbit, in operation for seven years more.