By Clara Moskowitz

updated 7:03 p.m. ET July 1, 2008

Scientists are eagerly awaiting a much-needed facelift planned for the world's favorite space telescope.

This fall, NASA astronauts plan to take a final space shuttle trip to fix the aging Hubble Space Telescope.

Set to fly Oct. 8 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the mission will carry seven astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis to upgrade the 18-year-old Hubble. Ground crews at Kennedy Space Center are hard at work on repairs to Launch Pad 39A, which suffered damage during the shuttle Discovery's liftoff on May 31. The work is expected to be finished in time for Atlantis' launch.

"Hubble's been flying for over 18 years, and although it's old, there's still a lot of great science left in this telescope," Preston Burch, Hubble program manager, said at a briefing Tuesday at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We believe that [this mission] is going to enable us to finally unleash the full potential of the Hubble Space Telescope."

The STS-125 mission will be the fifth trip to repair the orbiting telescope, which has been circling Earth about every 97 minutes since it launched in April 1990. The planned 11-day mission is slated to install new equipment and repair broken instruments during five spacewalks.

New additions
Atlantis is scheduled to deliver the Wide Field Camera 3, which was designed to image the distant universe in a broad range of wavelengths, from near ultraviolet light through optical light and into the near infrared. It will be particularly adept at studying some of the oldest, most distant galaxies in the universe, whose light has been redshifted to the infrared range.

"We have no idea what the universe looks like at these very high redshifts," said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "Our first hint will come from Wide Field Camera 3."

The mission is also due to bring Hubble the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, an instrument that can break up light into its constituent colors to reveal the chemical makeup and other fundamental properties of heavenly objects.

In addition to the new scientific instruments, Atlantis is set to deliver a set of six new and improved gyroscopes, which help stabilize the telescope, to replace its old six, three of which are broken. The shuttle mission is also slated to repair some broken instruments aboard the observatory, and bring new batteries and thermal blankets that should help the telescope operate until at least 2013.

The crew is also planning to install a docking port called a Soft Capture Mechanism to the observatory. When the telescope is ready to be retired, a future unmanned spacecraft could attach to this device to steer Hubble on a controlled dive down to its demise.

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