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NASA Engineers Dispute Hubble Safety Claim
Zeinfeld writes "According to the administration, the Hubble space telescope is going to be allowed to die in the next three years because the shuttle mission required to save it would be too risky. Meanwhile the public plans say shuttle missions to the space station will resume. Papers leaked to the New York Times say hogwash. The article (free subscription required) reports claims that money and politics, not safety are the reason. The public NASA story is clearly nonsense, and if the science from Hubble does not justify a shuttle mission, then it's time to pull the plug on the space station. I suspect that is exactly what will happen after the November election."
Currently this story links to the second page of the article.
I think he meant that if the hubble is `useless' and we're pulling funding, then we might as well also pull funding from the space station, since it is also `useless'.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/science/07HUBB.h tml?ex=1076734800&en=f74fc93d9204bbee&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
Engineer's Papers Dispute Hubble Decision
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 7, 2004
ASA's decision to abandon its crown scientific jewel, the Hubble Space Telescope, cannot be justified on safety grounds, according to a pair of reports by a NASA engineer that have been circulating in scientific and political circles in the last few days.
The unsigned documents are attracting attention on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House Science Committee, which is expected to discuss the Hubble decision at a meeting on Thursday.
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"We're reviewing the Hubble decision, looking at it very closely," said a spokesman for Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York and chairman of the committee. "We're going to be examining the views in this particular document as well as a whole host of others."
The documents have also created a buzz among astronomers, who hope that their wider distribution will help spark a larger debate about the telescope's fate. The reports have deepened astronomers' skepticism that safety and not politics and money was the issue last month when Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, announced the cancellation of the space shuttle's planned 2006 maintenance visit to the telescope. As a result, the telescope will probably die in orbit within three years, astronomers say, instead of lasting into the early part of the next decade as originally planned.
In explaining his decision, Mr. O'Keefe had cited a recommendation of the board that investigated the Columbia space shuttle disaster last year that NASA must develop a way to inspect and repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system.
While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was committed to developing this ability for missions to the International Space Station, which could serve as a "safe haven" for the astronauts if the shuttle was damaged, Mr. O'Keefe said it was too risky and expensive to develop an "autonomous" inspection and repair capability for a single mission to the telescope.
The new reports challenge Mr. O'Keefe's conclusion, citing data and references from NASA documents in arguing that the administrator's statement "cannot be supported."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations and NASA's plans for "return to flight" include ultimately developing just such an ability to inspect and repair the tiles independently of the station. That autonomous ability is needed because the shuttle might fail to make it to the space station, or the space station may become too big and complex to serve as a repair base, according to the papers.
One of the reports concludes that missions to the telescope "are as safe as or perhaps safer than" space station missions "conducted in the same time frame."
The author is a NASA engineer who wrote the reports based on internal data and who declined to be identified for fear of losing his job. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by an astronomer who is not part of NASA and opposes the decision to let the telescope die.
"Those documents certainly undercut the public position of the agency," said Dr. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science.
Dr. Illingworth added that it was important to open up debate on these issues. "We need to get real information out there, and not just have a few people in NASA saying we know what's best," he said.
A Congressional staff member who was given the documents said they appeared to be credible. "We are taking them seriously," he said. Referring to the requirement of an autonomous repair capability, he said, "NASA's going to have to spend the money to do this" if the agency follows the accident board's recommendations.
The documents also argue that missions to the space station might actually be riskier than going to the space telescope for several reasons. Because of the space
There are other alternatives, such as cutting the budget of Cold War-era military projects that offer no particular value.
Except, of course, for the new generation of ground-based telescopes with better resolving power than the hubble. It's silly to spend more money on inferior technology just because it's space-based and therefor "must be cooler".
Hubble's replacement is scheduled for 2012 and it sees in infrared. Hubble uses visible light spectrum. There is no scheduled replacement for hubble.
I don't know the details of the spectrum that the Webb telescope will be able to view. But viewing only infrared is not as odd as it seems. Visible light and infrared astronomy overlap a great deal. The really deep objects are so greatly red-shifted, they are in the infrared when the light gets to us. And since the Webb telescope is primarily for viewing such objects, this makes sense. But you are right in that it will not be a direct replacement for the Hubble, although it is close.
And I agree that shutting down Hubble makes no sense. It is doing great astronomy and could continue doing so for many years. I also think it's a mistake to put the Webb telescope at the L2 point rather than in Earth orbit. Hubble has shown that the ability to do repair missions is invaluable.
The Supreme Court didn't directly vote on who should win the 2000 election, the question they voted 5-4 on was whether Kathrine Harris, a Republican who the Secretary of State of Florida, did her job correctly.
Florida law, as it had been on the books for years, had a rather blatent loophole. Kathrine Harris could certify the election results on Monday, or she could, at her sole option, open her office on Saturday for sole purpose of handling the election results then. Knowing that if she waited until Monday and allowed the Palm Beach recount to finish, Gore would win, but if she froze the numbers on Saturday, Bush would win, she chose to put on way too much makeup and announce that the results were certified on Saturday, and therefore Florida would send the presidential electors who had been selected by the Bush campaign.
Media recounts would later find that if Palm Beach had finished, Gore would win. However, if the entire state did a recount, it would be the decision on which standard of chad-counting was used that would decide the winner.
The Florida election was truely too close to call. The number of punchcard ballots that had an unclear intent of the voter were greater than the margin of victory. However, there's no ties in American politics, so we have to pick a winner somehow.
There are several cases where small town political races for offices such as mayor end in a dead heat tie where after several recounts the numbers are exactly the same. In such cases, a random game of chance involving a coin, dice, straws or cards are used as the tiebreaker to determine the final outcome. Given the complexity in Florida... I'd call the process that got us Bush pretty random too.
I worked on STS as test engineer for several years until the mid 80's. The estimated catastrophic failure rates were then about 1/25 launches, based upon the 5 fleet. We're in the realm of physics here (well within an order of magnitude/factor of two or so.)
The politics has always overwhelmed the science; my pals in the spacelab DESPISED the scientists as eggheads, the scientists loathed the silliness of manned flight programs which bled the fundpot dry, without any real result. As physicist working in an engineering area, I got shot at by both sides. (A former NASA historian wrote a good treatise on that a few years back; can't recall the particulars.) Here we go again, except that this administration goes WAY further with it's hatred of science. In fact, I'll wager to say that it's his faith-based baloney which is behind this move, along with a goodly dose of wanting only manned programs, for the politics of it, and all science be damned.
http://thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6
BTW, I was asked to lecture to our entire department (about 400 engineers and technicians) when I left in mid-'85. The topic: what can we do to improve. Here's what I said: GET SERIOUS ABOUT SAFETY OR SOMEBODY'S GONNA DIE. And STAND UP AND SAY NO TO THE BOSS WHEN HE SAYS IT'S OK, AND YOU KNOW BETTER.
Yes but the additional facilities are listed in the article, and they are not that difficult. If you have problems a second shuttle which is ready to go the station and has docking facilities onboard will be able to go up and get the crew. As for inspection, for an HST servicing mission you go outside in many EVAs. Columbia did not have that capability which somewhat sealed their fate. At best, during an HST mission nothing unexpected happens. At worst we have to learn how to do a space rescue outside of the single orbit that includes the ISS (which if we plan to go to the Moon or Mars with any regularity we are going to need anyway).
And if you read the article, the Columbia report does say they need this ability to fix problems for the return to orbit as there may be a problem even getting to the ISS. The ISS is only a refuge if you can get to it. If there is a problem at launch and the orbiter doesn't make its intended orbit, you have to have a way to fix things then without ISS.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
Sure it can--you must not be aware of the advances in adaptive optics. There's a reason that the next-generation space telescope isn't designed for visible-light observations--advances in ground-based technology have overtaken the advantages of a space-based platform. (Specifically, with AO the important factor is more mirror size (to sense dimmer objects) then atmosphere, and a space telescope will never be able to compete with a ground telescope in that area in our lifetimes. Add to that the huge cost savings in not boosting the observatory into orbit --effectively increasing the budget for instruments.) Some informative links:
Keck Observatory
European OWL telescope
I worked on a project where we used telescopes with a primary mirror ranging from 2.5 m (that I operated) down to 60 cm (!), and we could do that becuase of the exceptionally good astrometry done by a couple of Hubble snapshots. I wasn't involved in the reduction of the data, but I think the 60 cm data was rather worthless, but you get the idea, it saves us a lot...
So, HST is really valuable, and if it dies, it'll leave a void which would set astronomy back a lot.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
You're right on all points except:
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Skylab wasn't 'allowed' to die, it was pretty much engineered to be disposable, it had no resupply capability (except whatever could be sent up in the capsules with the crew) - it was sent up with supplies already on board.
The other problem was its orbit. It had been talked about to use the space shuttle to lift Skylab and do some work to it to make it useful again, or at the very least stick a deorbit rocket package on it so it could be brought down in the middle of nowhere without risk of hitting a city. This would have probably happened in 1980, assuming a shuttle rollout in 1979 as planned. But then two things happened: one, a manufacturing problem delayed Columbia's rollout until 1981, and two, Skylab's orbit deteriorated faster than expected. A lot faster.
When a space station decides it doesn't like its orbit anymore, it's not a matter of anyone having to "allow" it to die - rather there's not much you can do to prevent it, just get the hell out of the way. Skylab was not Babylon 5, it had no maneuvering ability of its own, so once its orbit deteriorates enough, eventually the planet gets in its way and Skylab resembles a Lina Inverse fireball attack. We've since seen what happens when spacecraft crash over populated areas.
Now, Skylab was a rush job, we all know that, but it wasn't intended to be a permanent outpost in space - the plan was we would build better ones later after having learned from the mistakes we expected to make on Skylab. Skylab was intended to be the first, not the last, American space station. No one ever explained this to Nixon, apparently: the shuttle was supposed to be a pair with a new space station. Nixon OKd the shuttle but not the station. And it's been downhill from there.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Such a thing has been designed and worked perfectly the first time. The one they used was even made for a Soviet Salyut capsule->shuttle docking, when the Nasa engineers hadn't even seen a Soviet capsule. They made it entirely from blueprints of the Soviet docking mechanism. Surely they can make a double-ender for shuttles that are in their own back yard and can be tested on.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
- Clinton was asked "Did you have sexual relations with Monica Lewinski?" by the prosecutor
- Clinton asked the Judge to clarify and define the term "Sexual Relations"
- The definition given by the judge excluded oral sex, and concentrated on intercourse, consensual or otherwise
- Clinton stated the famous line
So he did not lie. His reply was within the definition given by the Judge, and is perfectly acceptable.Oh, come on, the safety issues are NOT nonsense. In order to go to Hubble, they would need to have two shuttles ready to launch at the same time so they can go up and rescue the first shuttle if it has a problem. If they both have problems, then they are both screwed. And no, you can't get to the space station from Hubble's orbit. Now, if they go to the space station, they can at least live up there until other launch vehicles come and rescue them. The safety concerns are completely valid.
Uggh.
Ground-based adaptive optic telescopes are only marginally superior to Hubble in terms of imaging. Hubble is still superior for long-term integrations (much lower SNR in space than Earth and can hence observe much fainter objects) and spectra.
Spectra from Hubble don't have atmospheric artifacts that even the best adaptive-optic scopes cannot get rid of.
make world, not war
Do you do any astronomical observations?
Having a larger aperature not only increases the angular resolution of your scope, but also increases the collecting area.
The first is very useful for imaging, in which case under certain ideal conditions ground-based AO imaging can achieve marginally better pictures than Hubble.
But the second implies faint observing, and the atmosphere still cuts the SNR of faint objects greatly. That is an area Hubble is superior in. Read about the Hubble Deep Field, for example. Ground-based observatories cannot keep the excellent SNR for a 100 hour observation (with breaks for lots of daylight) nearly as well as Hubble.
And for the n'th time, AO cannot take out atmospheric defects. Space-based spectra are (maybe in very few instances where high frequency-resolution isn't needed) superior
make world, not war
He used to be an astronomer (maybe he still is) so he knows the value of the Hubble.
Interestingly, he also said that he will go to Hubble, but won't go to ISS! Ie, he knows Hubble is more scientifically and technologically important than ISS.
make world, not war
...instead of putting those resources towards helping the existing small businesses grow. Homegrown jobs beat imported ones hands down.
You give Amalgamated Profits, Inc. a 10% tax break, they relocate their head office to your town. Your local economy becomes dependant on them - you become a Twenty-First Century company town. Ten years later, the next town over offers them a 15% tax break. They're gone. Your town is seriously fscked.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Saturn V carried a bigger payload.
The point of the shuttle was to go to the ISS. The point of the ISS was to have something for the shuttle to go to.
It was all about that Mars thing after the moon shot. NASA wanted to go to Mars, congress rejected the plan. They tried to do it in stages instead.
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