Slashdot Mirror

First off, we can't send up another Hubble for cheap - it has to be designed, built, and launched, all of which is expensive. To maintain the current telescope, all we have to do is launch, and as a fraction of what NASA is already planning to spend on launches, it's pretty cheap.

Secondly, Hubble is not "obsolete". Every single time it has been serviced, its capabilities have been upgraded with new instrumentation, vastly increasing its sensitivity and usefulness. Hubble has quite modern CCDs with exquisite sensitivity, and a servicing mission will install even better equipment. Here are the first images that were taken with the ACS camera installed in 2002. Compare those with this early WFPC2 image (an earlier camera). The servicing missions have increased Hubble's sensitivity by literally orders of magnitude, resulting in many incredible new discoveries.

We should absolutely fix this telescope.

While you're right that Hubble wouldn't be too useful for tracking this asteroid, Hubble is perfectly good for looking at things in our solar system.

The Hubble Space Telescope stands for everything NASA has done right in the last 12 years. At the completion of STS-61, the mission to replace the warped mirror, NASA's approval rating was at it's highest since the launch of Columbia. Possibly since the Apollo missions. Besides saving a $1.5 billion dollar investment. The mission proved that servicing missions could be done. It opened the door to the idea that in orbit manufacutring and repairs weren't just science fiction.

Since then Hubble has increased our understanding of the universe 10 fold. Its more than just a space telescope, it's a national monument. I think every effort should be made to keep it in working order until the technology exists to safely return it to Earth intact so it can be displayed at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

Which means that all those gorgeous images the previous poster was talking about will no longer be available other than with false color.

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to take pictures of objects that close, this is also why there are no clear up-close pictures of the moon.

1. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/
2. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/a
3. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/b
4. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/c

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to take pictures of objects that close, this is also why there are no clear up-close pictures of the moon.

1. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/
2. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/a
3. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/b
4. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/c

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to take pictures of objects that close, this is also why there are no clear up-close pictures of the moon.

1. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/
2. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/a
3. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/b
4. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/c

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to take pictures of objects that close, this is also why there are no clear up-close pictures of the moon.

1. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/
2. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/a
3. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/b
4. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/c

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to take pictures of objects that close, this is also why there are no clear up-close pictures of the moon.

1. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/
2. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/a
3. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/b
4. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/image/c

The idea that we could go to the moon was considered by some as being too much of a technical challenge, that just too many things could go wrong. I then watched on tv as the first moon landing was made. After that, I assumed that the government would always have enough money to explore space, put up a space station. In the 40's and 50's, the space shuttle in it's present form was not expected, or put forth in the ideas of what the future of space travel would be like. Buck Rogers had a spaceship that looked like a real space ship. I had expected the first powered space ship would go beyond Earth, to at least the Moon. The Apollo craft were shot into space, and guided themselves into place around the moon, using small rockets, with no comparison to the power of the Space Shuttle rocket motors. One would think that the Space Shuttle could go out far beyond the Moon, just for the fun of it, but with nothing there to see or do, then no mission.

Even so, the Space Shuttle is an amazing vehicle, and has had a long and dangerous history, now to continue for a while longer. Fixing the Hubble telescope was one of the good moments, how cool that was. Concerning the Shuttle accidents, I suppose we did always expect space ships to be destroyed, but by enemy alien spacecraft, death rays, or something. The idea of a space ship that would have design flaws, or push the limits of their design, was not commonly entertained. Most of what we kids knew came from comic books, so the idea of orbiting satellites was not even there, or the lumbering space truck that the Space Shuttle seems to resemble, wasn't in comic books either.

Too bad that there is so little of the national budget spend on space exploration, we all wanted "men on mars" by now.

No one needs to take the Shuttle Program for granted, it is one of a kind, and one wonders if funding will be available for something to take it's place.

What exactly do they consider direct versus indirect?

The article at hubblesite answers your question:

Figer estimated the stars' masses by measuring the ages of the cluster and the brightness of the individual stars. He also collaborated with Francisco Najarro of the Instituto de Estructura de la Materia in Madrid, who produced detailed models to confirm the masses, chemical abundances, and ages of the cluster's stars. [ ... ] Astronomers must know the cluster's distance to reliably estimate the brightness of its stars, a key ingredient used to estimate a star's mass. The cluster also must be close enough to see individual stars.

A better read than the ./ article reference is an article at hubble site.

Actually, according to this, Hubble does routinely look at earth. It mentions that it observes no details, most likely because it is essentially focusing at infinity. I suspect it looks at large, uniform areas such as white sands, NM for calibration purposes.

The telescope is for all intents and purposes, Hubble is farsighted, designed and aberration-corrected to look at things far away. The earth is pretty close. I think Hubble would need the large equivalent of reading glasses to accommodate this. This focusing ability may be wrong, because it would be difficult to explain the good images of the moon (see this post).

They made one exception to look at the moon once, but I believe they had to do some tricky things to manage that.

I didn't know about the Hubble Moon pictures, nice one! Found them here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/14/

Um, wallpapers??? ;-)

But I would worry about nuclear war, pollution and overpopulation than anything from the stars! :)

The Hubble has provided us with some of the best geek-oriented wallpaper imaginable.

Thanks for responding. Adaptive optics are amazing and a great advancement in ground based telescopes. And I have no doubt that if Hubble tried to take a image of what one of these newer scopes can see, and you compared the resulting images , that Hubble would probably lose.

Why then do I say that these scopes cant take the pictures that Hubble can? For the simple fact that the Earths' atmosphere is opaque to most radiation that is interesting to astronomy. Also Hubble can see objects in the visible spectrum that are too faint for ground based telescopes to see.

Earth based telescopes can only view the visible spectrum, and some radio (less than 1% of radio waves reach the Earths surface). Since the visible spectrum is only a very small part of what is interesting to look at, ground based telescopes are inherently limited.

For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, not only can ground based telescopes not stay on the same spot that long, but the part of the images were taken in infrared, again unviewable from the ground. And for those that think Hubble is old, these images were taken with the new camera installed in 2002. These images were impossible for the cameras that used to be on Hubble, and is still impossible for any other telescope in the world. Check http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/07/text/ for more information.

Try here
Check the link to the highest quality images for a 19 MB JPEG and a 33 MB TIFF.

Lots of space pictures at the HubbleSite here.

Try here
Check the link to the highest quality images for a 19 MB JPEG and a 33 MB TIFF.

Lots of space pictures at the HubbleSite here.

Here's the link without the type-o :)

(a) That's not a link

(b) It has the same typo as the original post (a space in front of 'releases')

Here is a link

obviously I have to use google a bit more often. Higher (print) res version of that image available from :
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2003/10/image/a

Still haven't found a further overview with a timelapse from those first 2002 images up to the latest one, though.

Service mission 4 is/was supposed to repair/replace batteries, gyros, and a torn insulation blanket. An fine guidance sensor would be installed. On top of this, two new instruments would be installed: NICMOS and COS. See http://hubblesite.org/ for more details on those.

The James Webb Space Telescope would not have the same capabilities as the Hubble in Visible light, but there are some land-based telescopes that are approaching Hubble-like capabilities using adaptive optics. They make up for having to look through the atmosphere by having a much larger diameter mirror plus adaptive optics that in essence remove atmospheric distortions.

Another option is the Hubble Origins Probe. see http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=16050
Take the instruments that were to be installed on Service Mission 4 and put them on a brand new telescope.

From all accounts, the most expensive option seems to be repairing HST. JWST is around $700M-1B, HOP around $1B and repairing HST approaching $2B. So would you rather buy a new car or repair that beater at twice the cost?

Big bang is quit accepted as a fact, but one should newer stop questioning things just because they're generally accepted. Anser me this:

If Hubble can se 95% of the "known" time http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/28/text/
How did we get so far away anything in first 5% of time that the light had to use the remaining 95% of time to catch up?

I'm just asking... And if you somehow can explain this to me, please go ahead :)

Remember the Hubble Deep Field in the darkest part of the sky, in an area about as large as a grain of sand held at arm's length, we saw at least 1,500 GALAXIES.

Remember the Hubble Deep Field in the darkest part of the sky, in an area about as large as a grain of sand held at arm's length, we saw at least 1,500 GALAXIES.

Remember the Hubble Deep Field in the darkest part of the sky, in an area about as large as a grain of sand held at arm's length, we saw at least 1,500 GALAXIES.

Remember the Hubble Deep Field in the darkest part of the sky, in an area about as large as a grain of sand held at arm's length, we saw at least 1,500 GALAXIES.

While the second part of this statement has some truth, the first part of this statement is completely false. Adaptive Optics on ground-based optical telescopes are just barely starting to get in the same ballpark as HST, when it comes to resolution. You have diffraction-limited imaging on HST, which gives you a resolution of 0.05 arcseconds (see here). I have NEVER heard of anyone getting better than 0.3 arcseconds from the ground (and rarely even anything approaching that). Moreover, optical interferometry has NOT been shown to work reliably in any sort of consistant way. I think they've managed to get two of the telescopes of the VLT to work as an interferromerter in a very clunky way, but nothing NEAR what would be necessary for regular users.

That said, you're right to say that ground-based telescopes have some advantages: easier repaired, bigger mirrors (although this becomes less true with JWST), cheaper.

But, as the parent notes, space-based telescopes also are able to observe at wavelengths normally blocked by the atmosphere.

Hubble has already imaged Mars. The resolution is nowhere close to these new images from MGS. They are images of the entire planet. Check them out here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1999/27/

Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images.

Look better. The two last images point to the same place. See the "small" galaxy or whatever at the bottom of the pointed supernova on the two last photos pointed on the quote. They're the same as the big one pointed on the first one, the photo has only been zoomed to that area.

Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images.

Look better. The two last images point to the same place. See the "small" galaxy or whatever at the bottom of the pointed supernova on the two last photos pointed on the quote. They're the same as the big one pointed on the first one, the photo has only been zoomed to that area.

Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images.

Look better. The two last images point to the same place. See the "small" galaxy or whatever at the bottom of the pointed supernova on the two last photos pointed on the quote. They're the same as the big one pointed on the first one, the photo has only been zoomed to that area.

Ok, I'll bite, rather than mod you -1 troll.

1) Age isn't necessarily a bad thing with a telescope. Lots of telescopes are a lot older than that - witness the Anglo-Australian Telescope, the UK Schmidt Telescope, and the recently burned-down Great Melbourne Telescope (aka MSSSO 50") which provided evidence that the universe is accelerating.

oh yeah, and hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 - you do the maths.

2) The replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimised for the Infra-Red and can NOT operate in the blue/UV like hubble. Nor will it be launched until 2012, 4-5yrs *after* the prospective hubble death date.

JWST will also be at the L2 lagrange point, meaning that there is NO possibility of any servicing mission. here is info on the orbit.

3) There are NO better telescopes on the ground for imaging. Hubble has a *diffraction-limited* resolution of about 0.05" - 0.1" (0.05 - 0.1 arcsec). The BEST sites in the world (Mauna kea, cerro paranal) get seeing as good as 0.3-0.4" at the best of times, and that isn't too often.

No, adaptive optics do NOT help because they limit the field-of-view. Hubble has a diffraction limited FOV across the entire chip.

4) Hubble does not have to contend with atmospheric absorption, which makes observations in some bands (like the aforementioned UV) nigh on impossible.

Propz to the Nasa guys for marking some of the images with the earths relative polar position. This should come in handy if I ever get lost in space!

Not for the dialup dudes, but great for broadband buddies:

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2004/23/images/ a/formats/full_jpg.jpg

I have read a great deal of his stuff, and his critics too. I am not talking about his THEORIES though, I am talking about his OBSERVATIONS, specifically concerning the planets in the solar system.

I checked into a few of his planetary findings (including Saturn's now missing ring spokes), and they checked out as advertised. Mars' ice caps are dissapearing rapidly, and had a 3 month long global dust storm a few years back. Solar activity is insane.. more sunspots in the last 40 years than the previous 1150. There's stuff like this described for every single planet. I haven't checked them ALL out myself yet, but the claims have been disturbingly true so far...

I continue to gasp at Slashdot posts that sound so authoritative but yet are so wrong, and this is another one. Hubble's defective mirror was not replaced; it's right where it's always been. The initial fix for the defect was a device called COSTAR, which was put in an onboard instrument slot (with ease, since Hubble was designed to allow astronauts to change out instruments) and used small mirrors to correct the aberrations for each of the other instruments.

All later instruments have been designed with the necessary optical corrections built in, hence COSTAR is no longer necessary and was to be removed with the next servicing mission.

Excuse me, but isn't there enough for everybody?

(All of this is pie in the sky anyway until we have better space transportation.)

We just aren't getting the same type of benefits from NASA that we once did, it's stagnant and dull.
What crack are you smoking and can I have some?

The hubble space telescope uses a CCD equivalent to a less-than-consumer-level digi-cam.

This site says: "The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has four CCDs, each containing 640,000 pixels." so that's a 2.5 mega-pixel camera.

Let's all keep this in mind....

0.005% ?? Not even close The universe is far larger than even most geeks realize. Our solar system is a far larger percentage of the milky way than the milky way is of the universe. Notice that in this picture, there is only ONE star from our galaxy. (it is the thing with lines comming out of it) For every star in our galaxy there are thousands if not 100's of thousands of galaxies.

Just to clarify... in the imaging data, the stars outnumber galaxies by a lot. They purposely target likely galaxies for spectroscopy, which is why there are more galaxies than anything else in the spectroscopic data.

That's in contrast with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, where almost every object is a galaxy, because they purposely chose a patch of sky with very few stars.

But, yes, there are an incredible number of stars in the observable universe. :)

[TMB]

You asked a very good question, and it is one that every astronomer gets confronted with at one time or another. I'll give you a quote I borrowed first, and then my opinion second. From a report by the National Science Foundation, here is a good summary of why astronomy is important in general:

The essential purpose of fundamental scientific cutting-edge research is to advance knowledge. Regardless of whether information of potential relevance to particular applications is sought at the time the research is initiated, the insights produced by the research enlarge the knowledge base on which future scientific and technological advances can draw. For example, studies of quantum mechanics in the 1920s were considered to be "pure esoterica" by many at the time--few people understood the theory. However, in the succeeding fifty years, results of this work in combination with findings and applications from other fields produced transistors, lasers, and electronic devices used today in a wide array of activities, including information processing, communications, and video imagery.

Here is my opinion, second: Astronomy research does not produce tangible results that improve your day to day life. I can point to technology spinoffs (X-ray machines at airports, CCD imaging - i.e., digital cameras) that you can attribute to astronomy, or you can argue came more directly from somewhere else (military). I could point to the fact that astronomy as an "industry" drives IT development (our storage needs are growing exponentially - check out the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and look up their daily data flow). However, what I would say is that what drives almost everyone in astronomy to do what we do is our strong desire to understand the universe AND communicate that to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The fact is that astronomy consistently rates as the #1 or #2 science most interesting to the public (the other is paleontology). We all have a desire to understand the universe, and I have personally been thanked many times by people for explaining how our Solar System works, where we are in the Milky Way Galaxy, and how we know the Universe is expanding. It is up to the tax paying public to decide if that is worth funding (BTW, our funding is a tiny fraction of the national budget compared to cancer research, and rightfully so!).

I really don't have an axe to grind about this. If Hubble is cancelled, my job won't be affected. However, my motivation for posting on this topic frequently is to try and combat a few misconceptions, and the previous poster struck a nerve. The fact is that the tax paying public has invested billions of dollars in Hubble, and it has paid the public back by being one of the most (if not the most) productive telescopes ever built. Please check out HubbleSite and page through the immense archive of fabulous imagery (I recommend looking for the V838 Mon light echo image, the Antennae Galaxies, Stephan's Quintet and/or Seyfert's Sextet, and any of the Solar System images). I do not dispute that we should have a dialogue about the future of Hubble. We should weigh the risks of servicing it to keep it in service for another decade. My position is that if the Shuttle (or a replacement) flies, servicing Hubble is a worthwhile mission because it simply can't be replaced by ground-based telescopes, and there is no space-based telescope that will have the capability of Hubble that will fly within the next 10 years.

Here's a brief bio on Lyman Spitzer, the "father" of space telescopes

Actually, while I don't doubt that they are trying to maximize the PR for Hubble right now, the truth is that Hubble has been in the news this often for about a decade now. You are probably just noticing it more because of the furor over the cancellation. In fact, all of the news releases in mission history are archived at Hubblesite. The UDF took a lot of planning, and in fact was begun in November of 2002, I believe, long before the cancellation of HST announced by NASA.

1) SM4 was canceled due to cost, we believe SM4 can extend the useful life of Hubble 4 or 5 years. Not True! SM4 was canceled primarily due to safety reasons. Please remember this, SM4 was Not Canceled due to Cost!!

2) Hubble is in 100% working order. Not true! The gyros which point the telescope are slowly failing.

3) Adaptive Optics/Clever Image Processing/Ground based telescope are better than or equal to Hubble. Not completly true! AO can image single objects to better than hubble. But AO has poor field of view! For reference, the UDF images have a field of view of 180 arcseconds square. AO fails above, 30, and degrades quickly above a few. Worst, AO needs a bright star to work. There simply are not enough of these stars! I can't reference this, but experts in the field think that it will take 30 years to get to Hubble's level of performance with AO.

4) Finally, AO will never work in at UV or near/mid IR wavelengths.

I am an astronomer, and I feel it is my duty to inform the public about the benefits of Hubble. HST serves a unique roll to the community. We should all understand exactly what the risk will be to fly SM4 before we lose 4 years of Hubble!

This is BS. The latest and best estimate of the age of the universe is from the WMAP data, which gave a result of 13.7 billion years. This was actually close to the lower (more recent) end of generally accepted estimates. Neither the original Hubble Deep Field nor this image has had any significant effect on estimates of the time of the Big Bang.

Actually, NASA would likely send up a robotic mission to safely take it down over an ocean.

Also, Hubble isn't written off yet -- there's still a chance that a shuttle might service it.

Thanks to all those who provided updates since I posted this, when the news broke. I thought I'd add a few more: The news from Hubblesite, The Discovery Channel, Yahoo News, and from Innovations Report