In May this year the shuttle Atlantis visited the device and updated several of the key components such as the wide field camera and several gyroscopes and batteries. This overhaul generally gave the Hubble telescope an extended operational life to 2020 as well as new and improved capabilities.
Hubble is one of the most important scientific tools ever built, it has answered some of the most important questions in cosmology so far in the history of our species, for example thanks to Hubble we know that our universe is 13.7 billion years old, that it is expanding and that the rate of that expansion is increasing. It also was the first to confirm the existence of planets orbiting other stars and the first to directly measure the 3-d distribution of dark matter, it has also shown us our solar system's probable destiny; at the heart of most galaxies including our own is a monster black hole with a mass many millions or even billions of times that of our Sun just biding it's time until the moment it becomes large enough to ingest everything around it. Better let NASA have some more cash to develop those WARP engines, how hard can it be?
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