Slashdot Mirror
NASA Debates How And When To Kill Hubble Telescope
Amy's Robot writes "The Washington Post reports that after 13 years of wear and tear, the Hubble telescope may be on the way out. NASA and some outside scientists have become involved in a heated debate about how and when to end the Hubble telescope program. Keeping Hubble in service until 2020 would require an extra maintenance visit by astronauts at a cost of at least $600 million. Some even worry the batteries could fail by 2010, since the next maintenance visit has been delayed by the Columbia accident and space station priorities. Is it worth maintaining our old friend Hubble, or should NASA let him go out in a blaze of glory?"
Yes I think hubble should be maintained. At least until we get the Lunar observatory built. Then you will get some cool picures of hubble crashing into the sun.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Cool slide show of Hubble photographs at http://wires.news.com.au/special/mm/030811-hubble. htm
I can't remember how Hubble was put up there - was it on a shuttle? If so, how feasible is it to just rope the thing in and bring it back? Is it worth the effort to do so and just fix it up, retrofit it, and re-launch, vs. dropping it out of the sky and building a new one?
It'd be great if they could bring it home in the Shuttle and put it in the Smithsonian... I'm certain the museum would hang it from the ceiling!
--Rob
This may sound idealistic, but whether they choose to prolong the mission or not, NASA should definitely consider bringing back the Hubble. It has tought us so much about the universe, and it's such a great piece of History that it's worth to be displayed in a place like the Smithsonian.
R,To push it out of our orbit, and see what kind of images is gets while it heads out of our solar system (and beyond maybe)? Or is is calibrated in such a way that it can only serve its purpose from our orbit?
Hubble bubble, toil and trouble...
Seriously, without knowing how much work is involved, would it be possible for NASA to retreive Hubble with a shuttle after a routine mission had been completed? Hubble has taught us so much it deserves to be retained in a museum somewhere. In a way, it's been as important to astronomers and astrophysicists as perhaps the Wright brothers' flyer was to aviators. It would be a crying shame to let it just burn up in the atmosphere.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If you haven't read the article, just taking amoment to read the first paragraph really summarizes it to me. I was just a teen when Hubble was launched but the images of space that Hubble gave me were a personal experience, though I have no connection to the industry of space exploration in the slightest.
...On the other hand, didn't they think of all these things 13 years ago when the were launching Hubble?
To me, it seems like destroying Hubble is not a fitting end to a tool that has built so much for us for over a decade.
So I wonder, why are devices like Hubble not built to be retooled - built with some type of standard socket connections so batteries, comupters, lenses, etc. could be more easily upgraded by swapping out major units and bolting them together on a frame just like a computer?
Would a shift in design principles not be the ultimate homage to Hubble, that it would live on as inspiration for developing space exploration devices that were upgradable?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Not the same, but you can't ignore the price.
I wonder if it's at all possible or feasible to figure out a way to attach it to the space station. Then it can be either maintained by crew on the station from time to time (since the space station seems to be where we're keeping or interests/people), or slowly scrapped. There's gotta be a few million $$ of parts that can be reused on that sucker, no?
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Therefore a logical decommissioning date would be just after the new scope is up and checks out functionally.
Has anyone thought about automating this stuff? Make these things modular so unmanned robots can do the servicing and updating. Embed little marker tags into the craft so an approaching repair-bot can find its way around, like those robots that follow colored lines on the floor.
--- Ban humanity.
There have been several options listed
a - burn it up
b - bring it back (maybe if the transporter survives the trip)
c - patch it (and give up other items)
and myabe others I missed in the convoluted article.
But one I didn't see in the article was to give it a good hard shove and put it into solar, or translunar orbit.
If this option were followed there would be a chance that it could be retieved later when bugdets were better, or could serve as a permanent exhibit in an solar space museum if we ever get serious about getting off this rock in a more permanent way.
The destruction of our orbital heritige is a symptom of our throw away society, the mass has been moved the hardest part of the journey.
Why waste the effort spent by turning it into terrestrial litter.
Or develop some multi-billion dollar, space-qualified gimbal mounting.
Nah, the attitude/orbital requirements for the scope and the station are just too different.
Plus the vibrations from the space station everytime someone sneezes or touches anything would probably ruin your images.
--- Ban humanity.
...need I say more?
Check out the pictures taken using the other end of the spectrum, namely X-rays.
Take the wonderfully violent Crab Nebula for instance. Just marvellous.
The owls are not what they seem
for those who don't know, the whole point of a nuclear reactor is to provide lots of heat to boil liquids for a turbine generator. You wouldn't need to do this if you can use all those microwaves and hard radiation floating around space. con: water is heavy. pro: water blocks radiation and it never needs replacing
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What's the possibility of placing Hubble inside a special re-entry vehicle (perhaps a big tube with heat shield) and parachuting it down like the old apollo spacecraft did? It's seems like such a waste to destroy such a significant part of space history.
When all else fails, run.
The second one failed in April. If Hubble only had two working gyros, it would be shut down until repairs could be made (as was done in 1999). Three is the minimum required for pointing the telescope (one for each dimension).
Why not just attach this throwaway rocket and instead of aiming it to fall in one of earth's oceans, aim it at the moon just to see what happens! I mean, why not?! think how cool that would be to have a crater in the shape of the hubble telescope to preserve its memory forever...or at least until another telescope is destroyed on the moon ;)
Let me put it this way... the space elevator is to most spacecraft designers what string theory is to some physicists; Yes, it is a good idea. No, it's probably not going to work, and even if it could, we could never test it / build it. So it's really a moot point, and holding out hope for it is unproductive. Like it or not, we're stuck with chemical propellants for the forseeable future for Earth Access to Orbit.
And now, under orders from a White House (filled to bursting with creationists), some nickel and diming paper-pushers are considering frying it like a corn dog at the state fair. And let's not discuss how they are stripping down the James Webb telescope.
So, I guess it makes me feel older. Good run while it lasted though.
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
It's not impossible- from a physics and theoretical point of view. What I have yet to see addressed, however, are several 'peripheral' issues like security (Both from humans and from nature- has anyone thought of the consequences of weather on a really big, tall, presumably current-conducting filament?). Or operations/safety (How DO you repair it if a car breaks down in the grey area between upper atmosphere and lower orbit, say, 60 nautical miles up? Can't get a plane there. Can't get an orbiting vehicle there. Climbing would take hours if not days, while cargo could be rotting or people could be dying. Or extensive micrometeoroid impacts on that same grey region. Or power generation at the orbiting terminus; you certainly can't pipe power up there from the ground (current carrying filament being dragged through a changing terrestrial magnetic field? Say goodbye to stability, hello to torque!) and solar panel arrays are prone to failure if used in the long term. And so on... Those are just two major points I've never seen addressed in any comprehensive way. Certainly, in theory, it's the best Earth-Orbit system. But I remain unconvinced as to its practicality.
Of course, it'll be an incandescent softball surrounded by plasma and moving at 25,000 kph. But hey, nothing Johnny Bench couldn't handle.
...what we are seeing are the death throes of the U.S. space program. It became a sealed fate after Congress cut funding to the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project. The only thing left to do in space that is beneficial to anyone is maintaining spy and weather satellites, and some might speculate that the fine line between those two is thinning rapidly. If I were a betting man, I would go get your cameras and take some Shuttle pictures if it flies again, because it will be the last manned spacecraft that we develop, unless it's a black project...which might as well not exist as far as we, the average citizen, is concerned.