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to study the effects of long-time exposures in the space environment. There was a lot of material that was going to be subject to essentially the impact from oxygen molecules and other things that are up there, and just look at how material survived through a couple of years in space. It actually was supposed to be recovered, as I said, in a couple of years. After it was up for five or six, we started calling it the ELDEF—the Extremely Long Duration Exposure Facility.

It finally made it back down to Earth this year. Some of the results are supposed to be very interesting, but I actually haven't talked to the scientists who have been looking at it. It took them awhile to get the stuff back and into the labs. Apparently, a lot of the material saw more damage as a result of exposure, more wear and erosion, than people had expected. It'll probably take another six months to really get the scientific results out, but it's probably going to be pretty interesting.

As far as the Hubble Telescope goes, as I'm sure you all know, there was a problem with the secondary mirror. Unfortunately, what that means is that it's a problem with the Telescope itself. The repair that they're talking about is not going to be to replace the mirror that's bad. They're going to put a corrective lens in front of one of the five instruments. All the five instruments were made so that they could be taken out by astronauts and new generation instruments put in. It's designed to be repaired, replaced, refurbished and that sort of thing.

The intent right now is not to replace all five of the instruments, because you can't make the correction on the Telescope itself. You have to make it on the individual instruments. Two of the instruments actually aren't very much affected by the problem. The spectrographs are doing okay. But the right field camera that does very high resolution and long duration exposures needs the corrective lens in front of it to do what it was going to do. It essentially means building a new camera which is going to take a year or two, and then launching it, but launching it with the corrective lens in front.

The good news is that since they now know exactly what caused the problem, they know exactly what kind of lens to build to completely correct for it. They will be able to put the complete correction in front of the camera. If the astronauts can delicately take out the camera that's in place now, and send it back home, and put in the new replacement camera and have it lined up properly, then it should be able to get absolutely all of the data that it was supposed to. And it should be able to answer a lot of the questions that it's advertised to answer. It does only fix one of the instruments, though.

Thank you very much.

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