Nasa Says 'no' to Hubble Reprieve

falconed writes "From the BBC, 'Nasa has given a final "no" to requests for it to change its mind and grant a reprieve to the Hubble Space Telescope.' Not much new info here; canceling the program due to safety issues. This has been discussed on Slashdot before."

Comments

It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[tiktokfx]

Or NASA if you must drop the periods, but never Nasa.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[th77]

To the Brits, it's Nasa. They like to make initial caps words out of acronyms, for example Nato. And British English tends to dominate in Europe, and elsewhere around the world, so...

Anyway, this is hardly a surprise from NASA. I mean, the requirement for *every* shuttle flight to be in ISS orbit, so they can get off and crowd into the station if there's an emergency is nice, but not terribly useful. Then again, the shuttle itself is being repurposed as little more than a, er, shuttle (as in shuttle bus) to the station. Grumble...

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[bobbis.u]

Yeah, I've noticed the BBC do this before with NASA and lots of other acronyms. Like here where they do it with UNESCO and UNEP, even though they capitalise the first letters of the words when explaining the acronyms.

They do seem to keep abbrevations capitalised (e.g. DNA in that article). Strictly speaking, an acronym is an abbrevation that is said as a word, i.e. you say Nasa not N-A-S-A, but you do say D-N-A.

I think I will write to them though because it can't be correct to remove the capitalisation in this way.

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[bobbis.u]

Actually, I have now checked the "Oxford Guide To Style" (a good resource for typesetting in British English). Firstly, it says "Acronyms take no points, whether all in caps..., in initial capitals with upper and lower case..., or entirely in lower case" so N.A.S.A. is incorrect.

It goes on to say "Any all-capital proper-name acronym is, in some house styles, fashioned with a single initial capital if it exceeds four letters (Basic, Unesco, Unicef). It appears the BBC does this with acronyms that exceed three letters. I'm glad I cleared that up for myself

Re:It's N.A.S.A., dammit.

[XaProf]

And British English tends to dominate in Europe, and elsewhere around the world, so...

Actually, when I spent my year in Europe I met a lot of Anglophone Europeans who said they had a choice when they learned English to learn American or British English, and most chose British simply because Britain is closer than the U.S.

But elsewhere in the world? I'm not so sure. Every single Latin American I've met who speaks English speaks American English. The vast majority of Asians that I've met do as well, in spite of the fact that they could be geographically closer to Australia than the U.S.

I don't think it's as much what's the "proper" English as it is about simple cultural dominance. More people watch American movies worldwide than listen to the BBC, after all.

Disposable Satellites

[Zilfondel2]

Remember, these things are disposable. It doesn't matter if it's a billion dollar telescope or an $800 million rover on Mars, eventually it will run down and that'll be that.

However, we don't currently have a replacement for Hubble, and even if we are ready to launch one, there is no guarantee that it will surivive launch, or actually work once in orbit.

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[aitala]

The James Webb telescope will not be accessible by anyone - its going to be at the L2 point. There will be no way to service it if anything goes wrong. And it is a very complicated piece of machinery - including a multi segmented mirror which will have to unfold to be useable.

You're missing the point

[Aardpig]

It costs a not-insignificant amount of money to keep Hubble's support infrastructure at STScI running -- above and beyond the maintenance costs required to keep the telescope alive. This is the principal reason for the cut -- to save money.

The same economic reasons have been used before to cut space-based observatories; the International Ultraviolet Observer is one example.

Re:You're missing the point

[Dashing Leech]

Safety is indeed the primary reason. There are a variety of reasons:

The Hubble requires a due-east launch from KSC. The emergency landing sites in Africa are in the process of being shut down, so there'd be no emergency landing sites. (Setting them up again would be quite expensive.)

Return-to-flight rules for the shuttle include the ability to inspect the Thermal Protection System (tiles and RCC panels). As we speak the details of how this will be done are still being worked out. (I am personally involved in this process.) Right now plans include using both Canadarms (shuttle and ISS) to move a boom with a sensor package underneath the shuttle. Another task involves rolling the shuttle and viewing it from the ISS as it approaches. There is currently no inspection concept that would work for a Hubble mission, violating the CAIB requirements for flight. There are future plans for a free-flyer inspector, but that is years away. The ability to fix or patch damage would be even harder for Hubble than ISS.

Hubble is at approximately twice the height of the ISS. It is at the limit of where the shuttle can reach, so if there are problems they're essentially out of luck.

The shuttle can handle a fair number of failures on ISS trips, even including some engines. This is both because the ISS offers extra repair abilities and because of the lower orbit.

For large failures that can't be repair, the ISS offers a "lifeboat" for the crew who could survive there for quite some time until another shuttle or Russian spacecraft can retrieve them. On Hubble, they're screwed. Russians can't even reach them because of the orbital plane.

These are the jist of the safety reasons. But then come the technological and financial reasons. Why should Hubble be kept running? It may have been state-of-the art when it was launched, but there are now ground telescopes that are even better than it due to advances in adaptive reflector control. It's just not worth it anymore. It could probably survive and produce data for another 10 years, but at lower quality and much greater expense than we can get elsewhere.

Re:You're missing the point

[luna69]

> Why should Hubble be kept running? It may have
> been state-of-the art when it was launched, but
> there are now ground telescopes that are even
> better than it due to advances in adaptive
> reflector control....It could probably
> survive and produce data for another 10 years,
> but at lower quality and much greater expense
> than we can get elsewhere.

Duh, wrong. Adaptive optics can, indeed, do marvelous things. But HST is above the atmosphere, and is used often in wavebands that are don't make it to the surface (UV). Additionally, HST is most definitely still "state of the art", and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which has already been built and is sitting in a warehouse waiting to be installed, will offer spectroscopy of a degree of precision unavailable anywhere on Earth.

Please, check your facts before making sweeping statements about how HST isn't state-of-the-art.

Re:You're missing the point

[Hays]

This may not be true for all wavelengths that Hubble can see, but it is true for a large part of it.

It is not true for much of the infrared range, because the atmosphere is opaque to some of it. The same goes for ultraviolet. Here's a graph of the infrared part -
http://www.coseti.org/atmosphe.htm

The webb telescope should cover some (all?) of that range when it's eventually launched. The Webb telescope will not cover the ultraviolet range that hubble covers. So your argument is that those ranges are not very important for observation? It's no big deal to lose infrared for the next 5 years and ultraviolet indefinitely?

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[Aardpig]

The James Webb telescope will not be accessible by anyone - its going to be at the L2 point.

And the decision to situate the JWST at L2 was made primarily on economic grounds. With no possibility of sending a manned mission to service the telescope, you conveniently avoid any chance of having to meet the large costs which manned missions incurr.

From the economists' point of view, Hubble was a disaster in this respect: a huge amount of money was spent sending the shuttle to service the telescope (a shuttle launch costs c. $500 million).

No good for the astronomical community

[fee79]

This means that there will be at least 2-3 yrs before we have an active optical telescope. Sure there's Spitzer but it can only see in the infrared spectrum. I think the hubble's time is up too, but I don't think it should be allowed reentry until we have another visible light telescope in place.

Lagrange points

[reverendG]

I've seen a few people suggest that not having the Hubble will be okay, because it's going to be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope. There was a good discussion on slashdot about this before, however, that led me to this site that explains the Lagrange points.

The Lagrange points are so far away from the earth that there are no reusable space craft that can reach them. This will make it next to impossible to service the JWST should something malfunction or fail (like the Hubble did so notoriously).

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[GoofyBoy]

the decision to situate the JWST at L2 was made primarily on economic grounds

Really?

http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/FAQ/FAQans.htm#anchor7

Sounds like a good scientific reason to me.

Re:Why not give it to DoD?

[Anonymous Coward]

snipped from the Hubble FAQ on the NASA website:

Hubble could take pictures of the Earth, but the image quality would be extremely poor.

1. The problems are that Hubble has a fixed focus which is set for looking at the distant stars and galaxies. The Earth is way too close. An object about 2-3 meters across would be one fuzzy dot. This is not nearly as good as Hubble could do if it could be focused.

2. The surface of the Earth is whizzing by as Hubble orbits, and the pointing system, designed to track the distant stars, cannot track an object on the Earth. The shortest exposure time on any of the Hubble instruments is 0.1 sec, and in this time Hubble moves about 700 meters. So a picture Hubble took of Earth would be all streaks in the orbital direction, and pretty fuzzy in the other direction.

Re:Too much data?

[Aardpig]

That said, could one possible reason be that the astronomical community at large simply doesn't have enough resources to interpret both sets of data?

Data management has been a problem in the past, but storage and computing power today are both so cheap that it is rare to run into a problem. Even on my el-cheapo Linux box (Athlon XP 2600+, $600), I can quite easily crunch through gigabytes of astronomical data.

it is a shame...Enjoy the pics while you can

[seriv]

I think this is on of the worse choice that Nasa could make. It is about the final choice to make science no longer an issue. Even if it is a saftey risk, so is going to the ISS, they are just sitting on a big bomb if something goes wrong. Safety is not the issue, engineers are saying so. But we should enjoy the pics while they are still around, this website is a news release center with high res pics of hubble pics. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/year/

Petition to save the Hubble

[fireacc]

If anyone is particularly passionate about saving the Hubble, there is an online petition here:
http://www.savethehubble.org/petition.jsp

Re:New Telescope in ISS orbit?

[j-b0y]

That's part of the distribution of costs agreement between NASA and ESA; NASA is paying the majority of the costs (and so American astronomers get the majority of observing time). ESA contributes an instrument and the launch vehicle and ESA member states gets a corresponding amount of science time, through a European Coordinating Facility.

It's not a bad agreement and not all that uncommon.

Re:typical NASA

[pla]

Weren't the astronauts alive in both cases of the shuttle exploding until they hit the earth extremely quickly?

In the Challenger explosion, yes. The actual "explosion" made a big fireball but packed little destructive force. Other evidence, such as the use of emergency oxygen masks, indicate that the crew survived the initial blast.

For the Columbia, I haven't heard one way or the other, but considering the ship actually broke up (rather than just the fuel tank rupturing, causing a fireball)... And then also considering the lack of oxygen or a pressurized atmosphere... Well, they most likely died rather quickly.


Isn't there a case for them having parachutes or some other way of getting out of their before that happens. Terminal velocity and all that.

That might have applied to the challenger crew, although I doubt they had time to figure out what happened, go for the parachutes, properly equip them, and find a way out of the ship.

Once you hit orbit, however, not even any point in trying to escape. Even in a pressurized suit, the lack of air means that a parachute will do very little. The idea of "terminal velocity" only applies when you have friction from air resistance. Even with a suit and a parachute, they would have burned up just like any other object entering our atmosphere at a few thousand mph.

Lens?!?!

[astroboscope]

Like all large telescopes, Hubble uses a mirror, not a lens.