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.

Comments

Another government screw up!!!

[Glowing Fish]

Well, here is just further proof that NASA can't do anything right, is full of beaurcracy and too expensive. Oh wait...it has been working for ten years.

Well, I tell you, that post office...

NASA

[Splitzy]

You know, everybody has been bitching latley about NASA's screw ups and lack of funding, but this is one thing that everyone can be proud of. Hubble has given us beautiful pictures and given us a greater look at our universe in action for a decade now.

Thank you NASA, for giving the human race such a wonderful tool to explore the galaxy.

------------------------

"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

Realistic Space Exploration

[gunner800]

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.


---
Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!

The Hubble Telescope VIOLATES ALIENS' PRIVACY

[Yu Suzuki]

I am continually outraged at how the Slashdot community -- a community which supposedly embraces privacy -- has turned a blind eye to the gross privacy violation of the Hubble Space Telescope. Imagine you're some three-eyed space alien living on some distant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. You're living a happy life; everything seems cool. But what you don't know is that the watchful eye of the United States government has been staring you for the past ten years, taking pictures of you and gathering data on your life like some interplanetary version of The Truman Show. Or suppose you're some big-headed gray alien orbiting the Earth in your UFO, ready to abduct some cattle. You lean out the airlock to take a piss, when suddenly -- BAM! -- the Hubble Space Telescope captures you on film. Talk about humiliating.

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

Re:hmm

[DeepPurple]

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

More upgrades on the way...

[bjtuna]

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.

Hubble The PR Machine

[Hrunting]

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).

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 .. or woman .. but not person).

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.

Re:Hubble the Paperweight?

[Morrigu]

No, I'd have to disagree.

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 :) 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.

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.

------------------

sure, but also good science

[mattorb]

You raise some good points, but I'd strongly disagree with the contention that the "real brunt work" is done by other satellites -- in fact, HST has contributed more (IMHO) to astronomy than *any* other satellite, ever. The pretty pictures are great (and you might be surprised how much science can be gleaned from such pictures), but there's also a lot of awfully hard-core stuff going on behind them. With Hubble, we've refined our notions of what goes on in supernovae (via SN 1987a), we've studied the environments in which stars form (O'Dell, Bally, etc's work on the Orion nebula), and we've gotten some strong hints as to the structure of the Universe as well as its ultimate fate. (Think of the "Key Project"'s determinations of H_0, or the various supernovae groups' determinations that there may have to be a "cosmological constant.")

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.

Re:hmm

[anticypher]

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