"A shuttle servicing mission is the best option for extending the life of the Hubble telescope and ultimately deorbiting it safely," committee chairman Louis Lanzerotti, a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said in a statement.

"NASA's current planned robotic mission is significantly more technologically risky, so a robotic mission should be pursued only for the eventual removal of the Hubble telescope from orbit, not for an attempt to upgrade it," he added.

The findings were presented Wednesday in a new NASA-sponsored report Congress had requested from the National Academies' National Research Council.

NASA must consider launching the mission "as early as possible after the space shuttle is deemed safe to fly again, because some of the telescope's components could degrade to the point where it would no longer be usable or could not be safely deorbited," the committee warned.

The panel also noted that this fifth and final servicing mission -- to replace aging batteries and install new sensors and gyroscopes -- was originally intended to be carried out by a shuttle crew.

"With the replacement of aging components and the installation of new science instruments, Hubble is expected to generate as many new discoveries about stars, extrasolar planets and the far reaches of the universe as it has already produced so far, with images 10 times more sensitive than ever before," Lanzerotti declared.

Since it entered into service in 1990, the Hubble has established the age of the Milky Way at between 13 billion and 14 billion years, helped gather evidence to support the Big Bang theory and provided the first convincing proof by an optical telescope of the existence of black holes.

All rights reserved. copyright 2018 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.