A newly released plot of the Hubble Space Telescope’s altitude shows just how quickly the observatory has descended in recent years.
The post on Bluesky by astronomer Jonathan McDowell is a stark reminder that Hubble is heading back to Earth, possibly sooner than previously thought, as its orbit decays.
Hubble was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, carried in the payload bay of Space Shuttle Discovery. While it remains capable of pointing its instruments and has returned breathtaking imagery over more than three decades in orbit, it cannot raise its altitude.
NASA has already been researching using systems like Dragon to boost Hubble.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasa-spacex-to-study-hubble-telescope-reboost-possibility/
In fact IIRC that was part of the purpose for some of the research being done by Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn. The second Polaris mission at one point was potentially going to be a Hubble servicing mission before further Polaris missions were cancelled by Jared Isaacman due to conflict of interest after becoming the NASA Administrator.
At one point Isaacman even offered to fund the mission himself hack in like 2022, but NASA and SpaceX couldn’t agree on the mission’s risk and in 2024 NASA rejected a private servicing mission because of “potential damage to the observatory”. Who knows if that would still be the case now with several more years of Dragon mission data and the alternative being deorbiting Hubble anyway.