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Hubble Turns 10
frinsore writes "Hubble turns 10! Seems like just yesterday that there was a flaw in the mirror, and it couldn't see. Now it's seen black holes, birth of stars, shoemaker-levy and the surface of Pluto. NASA can come back from mistakes." Not only that, but it survived a crash with the Satellite of Love in Mystery Science Theater 3000 : The Movie. Update: 04/25 01:30 by E : Hey, check out HubbleSite, too.
Well, I tell you, that post office...
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Thank you NASA, for giving the human race such a wonderful tool to explore the galaxy.
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"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin." -- Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615, during the trial of Galileo
I think the whole Hubble story could serve as a dose of realism for some of the extreme NASA-naysayers. Space exploration (be it hubble or that unlucky Mars robot thing) is difficult and expensive Put the two together, and you've got the possibility of failure.
We shouldn't be surprised that cutting edge technology fails on its way to another planet once in awhile. It would be downright freaky if every NASA project worked perfectly, on time and underbudget.
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Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
In Hubble's lifetime, we've gathered data from several Mars probes and one highly successful Jupiter probe, discovered new planets, re-written our hypotheses on alien life, located fountains of antimatter spewing out of the centers of galaxies, brought the search for alien life to millions of home computers, and discovered an orientation for the Cosmos. Cosmology has arguably replaced High Energy Physics as the hotest research field, and NASA is still launching interesting missions. Coolest of all, once troubled Hubble may outlive the once bleeding edge Iridium sattelites.
Happy birthday Hubble.
Finding God in a Dog
Oh, sure, you might say that it doesn't matter what we do to aliens; that it's them, not us. But remember, a violation of anyone's privacy hurts us all. We never how soon it will be before Uncle Sam decides to turn his giant eye towards the Earth. The next thing you know, pictures of you, your family, and your house are being downloaded into NASA's computers. Echelon is nothing compared to the horrific spying power of this insidious machine.
Dismantle the Hubble Space Telescope -- because space aliens have rights too!
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
Wouldn't work.
Turning hubble towards earth would blind it. The instuments on board are so sensitive that the astronomers have to be very careful they don't look at either the earth or the sun.
-p
Here at my school, Johns Hopkins, the Physics and Astronomy department is developing the Hubble Advanced Camera. The AdCam will increase the power of the Hubble by 10x.
http://adcam.pha.jhu.edu is the link for more info.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
The problem with private companes is they almost always look at the short term and try to make the most profit.
NASA has been forced to do this kind of thing in the past and what happened? The Challenger disaster.
Challenger blew up happened because the sub contractor for the solid fuel boosters decided to make them in several pieces instead of one like they had been before. The seals between the sections failed and the main fuel tank blew up.
This is what happens when private companys are involved on space, people die.
-dp
If no money is to be made then there will be no advancement...Privatization of space would lead to greater interest as space started making more money and this would inspire more people to space....
Your right, there IS money (heli-jack) to be made in space, if not right now then in the near future. Most asteroids are filled with precious minerals (gold, platnium, etc); space tourism will one day be a booming buisiness; zero-G research and manufacturing environments would be beneficial to many industries. The privatization of space will be like the privatization of the internet. Goverment will setup the ground work, such as space/moon/Mars stations, transport shuttles, etc... Once these are in place, and can be achieved at a relatively low cost, the corporate world will be all over it.
Remember, it was grounded and mothballed for several years before it got launched. (Can anyone say "Engineering difficulties and the Challenger explosion"?) According to this timeline on Nasa's website, "spacecraft integration" was completed in 1985. By my math, that would make Hubble 15 years old today, not 10, although obviously the resolution wasn't too good before it got launched (though some would say the same about after it was launched and before the subsequent repairs).
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Have you ever noticed how when NASA gets in a funk, it's always the Hubble Telescope that saves the day? I mean, think about it, the first real important mission after the Challenger accident was the launch of the telescope. When the telescope was defective, NASA used it to show just how expertly astronauts can work in outer space (can we say 'space station' anyone?). NASA gets in a bit of trouble with the Mars missions and, whoa, Hubble turns ten (and re-releases some pretty pictures to boot). Hubble has done a wonderful job of generating PR for NASA. In fact, tonight on ABC World News, I saw a report on how the only pictures scientists ever release from Hubble are the really pretty one (they have a gallery at their web site, although I haven't checked it out yet).
.. or woman .. but not person).
Hubble's a PR machine, especially when you consider that the real brunt work is done by other space telescopes like Chandra. In fact, Hubble gets the most attention because its imagery is the most 'real' to the layman (read: Congressman
So here's to ten more years of Hubble. Hopefully, it can keep NASA around long enough for it to get the next big PR booster it needs, the space station.
No, I'd have to disagree.
:) shoddy work from a cheap contractor, and did nothing to rectify the situation. More money does not always solve problems, but when you add a tight budget, an urgency to perform or risk dissolving the program, and government bureaucracy together, you won't get good results.
Look at the Skunk Works arm of Lockheed Martin. Regardless of LM's corporate problems over the years, Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich managed to produce aerospace (the SR-71 Blackbird was as much a spacecraft as an airplane) products second to none in performance and reliability.
And it'll take another fifty years for all the documents on the US ballistic missile program to become unclassified, for the public to find out the tremendous engineering achievements that happened under the tightest security imaginable.
The problem with the Challenger disaster is that NASA either was forced or chose to accept (depending on your viewpoint, I'd recommend Richard Feynman's myself
Good aerospace engineering, like any other endeavor, takes time, money, and experience to do correctly. It can be done by either a private company or a government agency. When it's done right, it works wonders and accomplishes the impossible. When it's done wrong (unlike a personal computer losing a day's worth of work) people die, programs are cancelled, and billions of dollars are lost.
It's that strict need for quality that makes good engineering so incredible, and bad engineering so tragic.
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"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
2) Weigh the brick to make sure it ways one pound at sea level.
3) Make a pile of bricks 3,300,000 big.
4) Twice.
5) Throw both piles of bricks into orbit.
6) Acuratly.
These 2 candle sticks provide over 70% of the lift required to get the shuttle to jump off the pad.
I haven't kept up with recent developments on jet engine design, but I can assure you that there is no way to get this kind of thrust/weight ratio in any other reusable device. http://spaceflig ht.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/srb/srb.html has more info.
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That's a very simplified explanation. My understanding is that the boosters were manufactured in pieces from different states for political reasons and that dispite the engineres saying unanimously that it was too cold to launch, the higher ups went through with it with spectacular results.
As I remember, didn't the engineers of the O-rings know that they weren't reliable under a certain temperature? The problem was that NASA decided that shuttle was going up, and wouldn't listen when the engineers said it might not.
I guess my point is this: sure, there are areas Hubble will never be able to probe, questions it will never be able to answer, pictures it will never be able to take. And other satellites have been designed to probe those areas, answer those questions, take those pictures. But Hubble has done what it was *designed* to do, extremely well. We'll all be sorry when it's gone. ;-)
Just my 2 cents.
If you go and read "the cuckoo's egg" by Cliff Stoll, find the part where he mentions the cracker is looking for something called KeyHole 11.
The NSA guy goes pale when he hears that. Cliff asks him what it means, and the guy says that KH11 is the same as the Hubble, only it points at the earth. Cliff does the math for what the optical properties would be (badly, he later admitted, because he didn't take into account adaptive optics and a dozen other well known tricks), and comes up with the resolution for what a Hubble sized telescope could see on the ground, 8-15 cms.
Over on sci.military and alt.conspiracy the story maintains that in the 60's, the NRO had brought in some astronomers to create a telescope that could spy on the earth with great precision. The astronomers created at least 12 of them, each bigger and better than the last. But the optics and communications packages were made for looking downwards, and the astronomers were dying to point it at stars. They carefully leaked a lot of the design specs to others starting in the 70's. This got turned into congressional funding, and eventually the single Hubble was created. Rumour has it the hubble and keyhole satellites share an almost identical design, only the sensor packages and civilian communication packages are different.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
> Seems like just yesterday that there was a flaw in the mirror, and it couldn't see.
Actually, Hubble has always been able to see. The flaw in the mirror only held it from performing as well as NASA had expected it to.
~Steve
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"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
Standard disclaimer: I am not a space cadet.
IIRC, solid rocket boosters are a lot less complicated and a lot cheaper. They have few moving parts, unlike a jet engine, and so there's less engine and more fuel.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Don't forget about the vast quantities of dihydrogen monoxide produced by the main engines.
NASA must be stopped before they destroy the planet!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Challenger blew up because a powerful US Senator from Utah decided that he wanted the contract to build the boosters awarded to one of his friends, Morton Thiokol. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have seen the value of building the boosters as a single section, but that would have required building them on the Atlantic or Gulf coasts and towing the sections by barge. Instead, to provide pork to Utah, the fatally flawed multiple section design was chosen.
It was a going to happen at some point, and may well happen again. The boosters should be a single unit, or welded sections.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Also in celebration of the 10th anniversary, STScI (the people who run the Hubble), have released a newly designed website hubble.site Plus Cowboyneal made a slashbox for hubble.site to show the most current pictures from Hubble!