CAPE CANAVERAL, Jan 17: Nasa announced on Friday it would cancel a space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, a decision that dictates an early demise for the most storied science programme in the space agency's history.

The Hubble, the most famous of all telescopes, has sent a steady diet of spectacular space images back to Earth since it was launched in 1990 and has been invaluable in helping astronomers and astrophysics understand how the universe was formed and how stars are born and die.

The Hubble could malfunction at any time, but Nasa predicts a failure between early 2006 and 2008. At some point after that, a robotic ship will be used to push the satellite out of orbit and it will burn in the Earth's atmosphere.

A shuttle mission targeted for mid-2005 would have repaired broken gyroscopes used to aim the Hubble and astronauts would have replaced batteries that are working on borrowed time.

That mission, now cancelled, would also have new instruments, including the Wide Field Camera 3, powerful enough to see back in time to the period when the first lights in the universe turned on.

Because of the time it takes light to reach Earth, telescopes as powerful as the Hubble actually act like time machines, allowing scientists to peer at the universe as it was billions of years ago.

"Its early termination and the failure to deploy the sort of last generation of instruments, which were even more fully able to exploit its capabilities, is tragic. The loss is immeasurable," said astronomer Donald Hall of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.-Reuters