Servicing Missions were a series of NASA spaceflights that sent astronauts to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to repair, maintain, and upgrade its systems and instruments. These missions ensured Hubble remained fully operational and capable of delivering groundbreaking scientific observations long after its launch in 1990.
During servicing missions, astronauts performed tasks such as replacing defective components, installing new cameras and spectrographs, upgrading electronics, and adding gyroscopes and other instruments. The missions often required complex spacewalks and precise manipulation of delicate equipment in microgravity, showcasing human ingenuity and technical skill.
Servicing missions significantly extended Hubble’s operational life and enhanced its capabilities, allowing it to capture deep-space images, study distant galaxies, and measure cosmic phenomena with unprecedented precision. They exemplify the importance of on-orbit maintenance for long-lived space observatories and have been critical to Hubble’s status as one of the most productive scientific instruments in history.