Why Hubble's worth saving, from SDC:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... anets.html
Excerpt:
A new technique has uncovered an extrasolar planet hidden in Hubble Space Telescope images taken 11 years ago
The new strategy may allow researchers to uncover other distant alien worlds potentially lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble archival data.
The method was used to find an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Astronomers knew of the planet's existence from images taken with the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008, long after Hubble snapped its first picture of the system.
The planet is estimated to be at least seven times the mass of Jupiter. It is the outermost of three massive planets known to orbit the dusty young star HR 8799, which is 130 light-years away from Earth. NICMOS could not see the other two planets because its coronagraphic spot — a device that blots out the glare of the star —blocked its viewof the two inner planets.
"We've shown that NICMOS is more powerful than previously thought for imaging planets," said the scientist who found the planet, David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto in Canada. "Our new image-processing technique efficiently subtracts the glare from a star that spills over the coronagraph's edge, allowing us to see planets that are one-tenth the brightness of what could be detected before with Hubble."
Taking the image of an exoplanet is not an easy task. Planets can be billions of times fainter than the star around which they orbit and are typically located at separations smaller than 1/2,000th the apparent size of the full moon, as seen from Earth, from their star. The planet recovered in the NICMOS data is about 100,000 times fainter than the star when viewed in the near-infrared spectrum.
Lafreniere adapted an image reconstruction technique that was first developed for ground-based observatories.
Using the new technique, he recovered the planet in NICMOS observations taken 10 years before the Keck/Gemini discovery. The Hubble picture not only provides important confirmation of the planet's existence, it provides a longer baseline for demonstrating that the object is in an orbit about the star.
"To get a good determination of the orbit we have to wait a very long time because the planet is moving so slowly (it has a 400-year period)," Lafreniere said. "The 10-year-old Hubble data take us that much closer to having a precise measure of the orbit."
Also, members of my family who have never seen a launch or the Cape and I are supposed to go on some tours (meet an astronaut, etc.) on days other than when there is the launch, and too much re-sked will throw that off. Of course, such things are more important than some old Shuttle launch itself...right? 
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