The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) will be repaired and overhauled in August, a month earlier than it was announced previously. The revamping mission will be carried out by seven astronauts who will fly the Atlantis space shuttle to rendezvous with Hubble in August. Their mission has already been labeled STS-125. The goal of the mission is to repair the orbiting telescope until a replacement will be manufactured in 2013.

Two years ago, NASA said it would send a special shuttle mission in September 2008 to spruce up the Hubble up on a long overdue servicing mission. The U.S. astronauts selected for the next servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope had begun already their training in February last year.

NASA had intended to mothball the Hubble before the new telescope was in place, a decision that was met with protests among astronomers who have been able to look into space 2.2 billion light years and more because they don't have to peer through Earth's atmosphere.

Missions to the space station are easier because ISS crew is on hand to help inspect the shuttle. The ISS also offers up to three months refuge for visiting crew in case of an emergency. The Hubble, which orbits 580 kilometers above Earth, offers neither. That means the shuttle would have to survive on its own for up to 25 days, with the second shuttle on stand-by at a separate launch pad for a rescue mission.

A year ago, the Hubble telescope's most far-seeing camera shut down due to a possible power failure and other problems, prompting NASA engineers to put the entire telescope on temporary standby. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was installed in 2002 in a special shuttle mission to replace the old space camera - in orbit since 1990 - and was hailed as the gateway to some of humankind's most spectacular views of the universe.

The August STS-125 mission aims to install a cosmic origins spectrograph and to replace a wide field camera in operation since 1993 with a Wide Field Camera 3. This latest camera will be the first on the Hubble that can cover everything from the ultraviolet to the infrared spectrum.

The aging telescope is also in need of new batteries, new gyroscopes and a new thermal blanket to insulate it from the severe temperature swings as it orbits Earth every 45 minutes, NASA said. Also scheduled for fixing is the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The 11-day shuttle mission will feature five difficult spacewalks, which have to be executed with extreme care to avoid damaging the telescope.

Theoretically, the James Webb observatory will replace Hubble in 2013 the earliest. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was first conceived in 1946 by astronomer Lyman Spitzer, constructed since 1979 and launched in 1990.