by Neil deGrasse Tyson

From Parade Magazine http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2008/edition_06-22-2008/1New_View_of_Space
June 22, 2008

The Hubble Space Telescope, the most productive scientific instrument of all time, is slated for its fifth and final repair mission later this year. The space shuttle astronauts will launch from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., match orbits with the telescope, capture it, service it, upgrade it, and replace its broken parts—on the spot.

Roughly the size of a Greyhound bus, Hubble was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990 and already has outlived its 15-year life expectancy. Students in high school today have never known a time without Hubble as their conduit to the cosmos. This new servicing mission will extend Hubble's life several more years. It also will replace burned-out circuit boards to the Advanced Camera for Surveys. That's the instrument responsible for Hubble's most memorable images since it was installed in 2002.

Servicing Hubble is a task that requires exquisite dexterity. Filmed as part of a PBS NOVA segment on the Hubble repair mission, I recently had the opportunity to visit NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. There, I donned puffy, pressurized astronaut gloves, wielded a space-age portable screwdriver, stuck my head in a space helmet, and attempted to extract....
read more http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/category/subjects/spaceexploration