Hubble will live

At last, some good news. NASA has decided to NOT pull the plug on the Hubble Space Telescope.

REENBELT, Maryland (CNN) -- The shuttle Discovery will pay the Hubble Space Telescope a final servicing call in 2008, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced Tuesday.

The new plan reverses a decision made by former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe in the wake of the Columbia disaster that such a mission would be too risky to attempt.

"We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle's manifest, to be flown before it retires," Griffin told employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, where Hubble operations are based. He received a standing ovation. (Watch the Hubble from space -- :52)

Discovery will be commanded by veteran astronaut Scott Altman. His crew will include pilot Greg Johnson, robotic arm operator Megan McAurthur, and space walkers John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Andrew Fuestel and Michael Good.

The final Hubble mission, scheduled for May 2008, will install two new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3.

The astronauts also will service Hubble's gyroscopes, which keep the telescope stable for high-precision pointing.

As regular readers know, Hubble is something near and dear to my heart. Beyond the pretty pictures it produces, Hubble has been the workhorse of the atronomy community for many years now, producing some truly spectacular science.

Hubble's replacement isn't scheduled to launch until sometime in 2011, which would have left a huge void. I give NASA's decision a standing ovation as well.