Slashdot Mirror
Clock Ticking for Hubble
DoraLives writes "Ok then, what are we going to do with Hubble? Eventually, it MUST come down. The New York Times has a piece that addresses this less than pleasant (at least for the astronomical community) subject. Additionally "The decision about what happens then has been complicated by the breakup of the Columbia." Read all about it."
Why would that complicate things? All the incident proved was what we know already. Besides, Hubble's done some great things, and of course it'll have to come down eventually. We just have to move on and produce a successor.
Bash script for FP whores
Why don't we get some other country
to foot the bill on boosting it
into a sustainable orbit and paying
for the initial maintenance after
2010. I'm sure that an India or
Taiwan would be willing to take it on
for less than $500 million.
I've been an avid avid amateur telescope maker since I was twelve years old. It led to me studying astronomy for a time at Caltech. While I'm a programmer now, it's still a very enjoyable and intellectually stimulating hobby.
While a basic newtonian is a straightforward instrument that can be built by anyone who's good with their hands, telescope making can get as complicated as you want if you're really looking for a challenge. Optical design is still a wide open area of research in mathematics, software engineering, and physics, and some of the more interesting designs take quite a bit of skill to fabricate. That means anyone can make a satisfying telescope, but the hobby will yield a lifetime of interest because there's always new things to learn.
You can construct your own telescope with a primary mirror of 8 inches in diameter for less than $200. It will take quite a bit of work, but it is enjoyable and meditative work. Grinding mirrors is one of the things I do to relax and relieve the strain of coding all day.
A good place to start looking for information is the ATM FAQ. The procedures for grinding, polishing and figuring are pretty involved - you should buy one of the books from astronomy publisher Willman-Bell.
There are a number of people and business who sell inexpensive mirror grinding kits. They will come with a glass mirror blank and an assortment of different sizes of abrasive grits. I would recommend asking on the ATM mailing list (that you can find in the FAQ) when you're ready to order your first kit.
The 8" plate glass kit I bought from Dan Cassaro for my current project set me back $64. When I get done working on the mirror, it will cost me about $35 to have a vacuum coating laboratory aluminize it. Good quality eyepieces cost about $50 - just one will do to start with but it helps to have more.
While fancy equatorial mountings can be expensive to make, it's possible to make a quite servicable altazimuth mount out of common materials like plywood and a few hand tools.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Hubble was designed to be serviced, on-orbit, by the Shuttle. This is '70s NASA remember which was juust getting the hang of perpetually self-justifying programs. Why do we need a Shuttle? To service Hubble, of course! Ahh, but why do we need Hubble? To give the Shuttle something to do!
Rather less cynically, note that the design life[*] of most unattended satellites is 5 years. After that period of time, enough is going to have started going wrong (fading power from radiation and micro-meteorite damaged solar cells is the classic example) that it's just not worth adding extra redundancy into the design up front to cover it (remember that redundancy = mass consumed that can't be used for the primary purpose of the sat.). Hubble has been up nearly 15 years now, and still has 5 years of useful life in it. That's because all of the things that traditionally go wrong - see the solar cells - have been replaced at least once. Also note that not only was the critical design-flaw in the mirror corrected on-orbit by the first Shuttle service mission (turning what would have been a wasted sat. requiring complete replacement and relaunch into a fully-functioning success), but later service missions have replaced components with improved versions, increasing the capabilities of Hubble enormously. It's like there's been 3 Space Telescopes up there, for the cost of... well, let's not go there. NASA's more than capable of making it look like it's cost less than 3 complete new telescopes, I'm sure...
[*] = as opposed to the actual life which can be much longer, but can't be predicted in advance
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
For everything Hubble has done to further astronomy (and since it was practically the only bright spot of the otherwise maligned space program), they owe it a better end than what they are proposing. To deorbit it and let it burn up with as much thought as one would give to flushing a dead goldfish is just plain wrong.
It should definitely be retrieved and become a piece in the Air & Space Museum's collection.