Science 1: Space Junk 0?

Last week Geoff Brumfield reported in Nature about possible delays to the upcoming Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission ("SM4") due to the recent satellite collision. Naturally, those of us who know and love Hubble were a tad concerned about this latest development, which would probably have led to a complete shutdown of the telescope in a year or two. Hubble is currently the equivalent of a 1969 VW Beetle that's scheduled for an upcoming episode of "Pimp My Ride" -- it gets around town just fine at the moment, but we hope it keeps long running long enough to be tricked out during SM4. The latest news (or latest to me, since I just got a hold of the memo, which is actually about a week old), is that they're cautiously optomistic that the servicing mission will be able to go ahead. The key points given in the "settle down ...