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The Hubble's Fate In Debate at NASA
FortKnox writes: "Well, it looks like NASA is trying to determine what to do with the Hubble. 2004 is supposed to be the last transmission, but NASA might keep'er up till 2010. Also, they are considering maybe putting it in higher orbit. If they are going to retire it, I say we need a replacement. It has really shown the beauty of space, and given scientists closer looks into the cosmos. We can't just let that "die", we need to continue studying!"
Ack. Wonder how many 1/4 wavelengths you can fit in a millimeter?
Would you use the mirror for combing your hair or something??? It's history.... significant history. It should be brought back to earth and put in a museum.
Hubble was foobared when it was put into space. Nasa has spent how much fixing it? It's time to retire it and move on. Save our tax dollars for some really cool telescopes like the OWL and NGST
Sell parts of Hubble on eBay. I bet they could recover a substantial amount of the cost. Ok, maybe 10%.
I dunno, the Russians couldn't hock their shuttle.
Maybe NASA will crash the Hubble and sell exclusive publicity rights to Taco Bell.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
http://www.ngst.stsci.edu/
it was tested with something like a foucault tester. But it was not "star tested", optically speaking, by mounting it on a structure, point it to the sky, etc
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
The first breathtaking images of the cloud speckeled planet orbiting Bernard's Star had started it all. Somewhat blurry but a resounding success for the flotilla of 50 interferometer telescopes.
And then it started. Satellites were emerging from Terra like popcorn. Scientists around the world had come up with a protocol that would allow any satellite to participate in a imaging session, from anywhere in the solar system, so long as an unobstructed view of the target was available.
The number went to a thousand, one hundred thousand, and just last year, over a million birds, waiting out there in the blackness of space.
Frank watched the telemetry data roll back in. Couple of the scopes were oscillating, cheap bearings in the stabilizer gyroscopes most likely. He tapped in some new coordinates and sent them to The inflicted scope's IP addresses. Destination, Mars.If Zaphod didn't have his money, he'd better pray the gyro's were off enough to miss his house.
Later that night, once that data came streaming back, he'd watch the wall of fire consume another far off planet along with the millions of others within the crushing sphere that bordered the known universe. Technically they were expanding into the wall, according to the latest cosmological model but that gave him little comfort. He longed to warn them somehow but it was too late. Their ashes were long gone, millions of years ago, in a place that may no longer even exist in spacetime itself.
And they had acted as expected. Spraying out all the information known to their civilization in a final gasp of laserlight. The trivial, the technical, the personal stuff for a whole planets worth of people, or whatever they were. If they weren't going to escape, they'd at least not be forgotten, and being instantly fried by the gamma radiation of the outgoing data would be far more enjoyable than falling into miles deep cravasses that would form as the gravity waves of the wall began to shake everything apart.
And everybody did the same thing when the wall, or some other cosmic natural event occured. A belch of information, then silence. "Hello, we're dead, here's our porn, goodbye."
Frank taps in a few lines into the console and sends a couple terabytes of data to the webserver, and then settles back into his chair wondering what he'd have to say to the cosmos once our little corner of the universe met the wall.
The comment about not having a replacement isn't accurate, here are a few of the NGST (Next Generation Space Telescopes), that NASA wants to loft:
http://sim.jpl.nasa.gov/beyond/
http://tpf.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://lisa.jpl.nasa.gov
How that thing ever got into orbit without being tested is beyond me.
My understanding was that the mirror was tested - the test was just miscalibrated (one piece of the test optics was a few centimetres out of place). They needed to test the mirror continuously while grinding it.
Sell parts of Hubble on eBay. I bet they could recover a substantial amount of the cost. Ok, maybe 10%.
the hubble has lost 40% of its clarity. Meaning what Hubble is seeing is only 60% of what's there.
And why was the mirror imperfect? Because a congressman wanted the mirror made in his home district (pork barrel). Kodak offered to supply two, tested, mirrors for the Hubble (they're both in storage at Kodak) for a fraction of the price that was paid for the one, flawed, untested mirror.
How that thing ever got into orbit without being tested is beyond me.
Don't beleive me, search for Hubble and Kodak.
They will have to keep Hubble going till at least 2010 though, cause most of the aforementioned missions aren't till 2004-2007 (at the earliest).
Ok. It costs money to operate. Ok. It had initial problems. But why must we bring it down or discontinue it's use as long as it is functioning properly without consuming tooo many resources? I love astronomy, and I would love to see any of a variety of next generations telescopes floating around up there, but if ain't broke why fix it? Didn't we fix it already anyway?
Helloooo....Newman.
All the cool pictures in Time and Newsweek from the HST while in highschool. Though those where sehr cool photos of distant galaxies. After they first discovered the glitch in the optics, I was very surprised they managed to correct that. Was also very glad as an amatuer astromner that NASA fixed it. If they can increase the lifespan then bring it down to the Air & Space Muesum, that would be really cool, and I would wanna see that exhibit. (Yea, I have a few spelling errors, but I'm tired & need sleep ;)
Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
...send a probe out to the focal point of the Sun's gravitational lensing effect (about 550 AU from the Sun) and use the Sun as a *gigantic* gravitational lens to observe distant parts of the universe at super hi res.
-- SIGFPE
Retireing the Hubble before sending up a replacement, just seams, well, like people really arnt all that interested in learning about space anymore.
There is so much sky that if the observers spent from now untill they die without stopping, they still would not cover more then a fraction.
When I was a kid the only thing I thought would be more exciting then living in the past to watch discoveries be made, was to live in the future after many more had been made. I wanted to learn to my brain exploded.
Everyone I knew was like that. There was a time when the people of america all were behind the space projects. Now we all hear about the money being spent as though investing in the human race isn't cost effective.