Feb 2 2005
From The Space Library
NASA announced it had accepted an invitation to join the National Invasive Species Council (NISC), a cabinet-level council established in 1999 to coordinate federal responses to harmful invasive species. As a member of the council, NASA would provide data acquired using Earth-observation spacecraft and predictive models to assist 12 other federal agencies' efforts to combat invasive species nationwide. The council had extended the invitation because of NASA's previous work monitoring invasive species: NASA had provided data, predictive models, and systems engineering to the USGS, information that had helped the USGS build predictive maps of invasive species in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. With NASA's assistance, USGS had converted data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer aboard NASA's Terra satellite, as well as other data, to create predictive maps of plant species distribution. USGS had used the National Invasive Species Forecasting System to help improve the nation's response to invasive species. (NASA, “NASA Research to Aid Federal Invasive Species Council Efforts,” news release 05-035, 2 February 2005, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/feb/HQ_05036_Invasive_Species.html (accessed 19 August 2009).)
The U.S. House Committee on Science held a hearing to examine options for the HST. Astronauts had serviced the HST four times since its entry into orbit in 1990. NASA had scheduled a fifth servicing mission for 2004, planning to make repairs and upgrades. However, because it had grounded the Shuttle fleet following the Columbia disaster in February 2003, NASA had not performed the scheduled servicing mission. The decision about whether to service or to decommission the telescope hinged upon the expense of the mission and on NASA's budgetary allocation of funds for the mission. Joseph H. Taylor of Princeton University, head of the National Academy of Sciences committee that set priorities for planning astronomy missions for the first decade of the 21st century, testified that his committee had identified the servicing mission to the HST as a priority for NASA's space program, but only if the cost of the mission did not exceed US$400 million. Taylor stated that he would not support the mission if it would delay other programs or if NASA would have to rearrange its priorities to fund the mission. Newly revised NASA estimates placed the total cost of a fifth servicing mission at US$1 to US$2 billion, a cost that NASA's Space Science Division could not sustain on its own. Experts testifying before the committee agreed that, if the Office for Human Space Flight and the Space Sciences Division could share the expense, the mission would be well worth it. (Warren E. Leary, “Repair Costs for Hubble Are Vexing to Scientists,” New York Times, 3 February 2005; Deborah Zabarenko for Reuters, “Hubble Repair Could Hinge on Who Pays at NASA,” 3 February 2005; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Science, Options for Hubble Science, 109th Cong., 1st sess., 2 February 2005.)
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