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A New and Improved Hubble Telescope?

Posted by Hemos on from the seeing-better-farther- dept.

Juda_ben_Maci writes "Foxnews.com is running this article on a plan being developed to revamp the Hubble Telescope with a new set of lenses that will boost it's magnification 10X. The stumbling block, NASA's non-existent budget."

1 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds nice on paper, but ... by hubie · · Score: 3
    The article is long on details on what one can do with a big mirror, but it doesn't go into the major technical problems you'd run into. There is a reason that mirrors have the particular thicknesses they do, which has to do with stability. You can't just arbitrarily grind off the mass of a mirror without some major consequences. The article doesn't mention what they would do to handle the stresses and strains that the very thin mirror would undergo. A glass mirror that thin is going to flop all over the place unless you can control the mirror shape, and we're talking about controlling the shape down to nanometer length scales (assuming you want diffraction-limited quality, which is something like better than 1/14 of the wavelength averaged over the useable surface).

    Keep in mind that this isn't a quick and easy retrofit for the Hubble. This is a major undertaking which would require a major budget. The article comes off sounding like it would be cheap and easy and silly not to do, whereas it would probably turn out that for the kind of money you'd be talking about, you might as well spend a little more and build a new, better telescope from scratch.