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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.
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.
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
...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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