Seven NASA astronauts are eagerly looking forward to a risky, but pivotal, shuttle flight to the Hubble Space Telescope this fall.

Veteran shuttle commander Scott Altman and his crew are preparing to launch in early October aboard the Atlantis orbiter on what is expected to be NASA's final service call on the iconic space observatory. The telescope passed its 100,000th orbit around Earth on Monday.

"What we want to do, though, is refurbish the Hubble so that it can operate as long as possible," Altman said during a series of NASA interviews released on Monday. "We're going to add some new instruments ... and then we're going to go in and kind of do internal surgery on some instruments that are already in the telescope."

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