QUESTION:
When do you think the Hubble will need to be repaired again?

ANSWER from David Soderblom on April 22, 1996:
The Hubble Space Telescope will be repaired next year, in a mission in
February.  This time we do not need to do anything as critical as correcting
the optics, but instead two new scientific instruments are being installed
in place of two existing instruments.  One of those new instruments does what
the two being replaced do now, only better.  The other new instrument is
completely new, and will observe in the near-infrared part of the spectrum,
at wavelengths longer than your eye can sense but not as long as thermal
radiation.

This new infrared instrument is called NICMOS, and it will be especially 
valuable for looking at places where stars are forming (there's lots of 
dust there, and only the infrared light gets out) and very distant 
galaxies (because of their very large red shifts).

Also next year there will be some other work to HST to upgrade some of the
support systems so that the satellite works better overall.