A second shuttle, Endeavour, stood on a nearby pad, ready for launch in a matter of days if Atlantis suffered disabling damage during the launch and the astronauts needed to be rescued.
The Hubble is in dire need of a tune up. The telescope has an antenna with a hole in it the size of a .22-caliber bullet. One of the telescope's main cameras has died along with an instrument called a spectrograph. Three of six stabilizing gyros are inoperable. A data router failed, and a backup had to take over. The telescope is slower to latch onto guide stars. The batteries are running down and the exterior has been tornup by countless collisions with tiny particles.
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The successor to the Hubble, the 6.5-meter James Webb infrared telescope, is scheduled for launch in 2014. It will tunnel even deeper into space to capture images of the earliest galaxies, so far away that their light was emitted near what is thought to be the beginning of time and is only now reaching NASA instruments. There is hope that someday NASA will build a space telescope twice the size of the Webb and about 25 times as sensitive as the Hubble. The picture above was taken by the Hubble and is thought to be NASA's most famous image. It has been aptly named 'Pillars of Creation'.
