Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the no-shocker-here dept.
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 hasbeen discussedonSlashdotbefore."
New Telescope in ISS orbit?
by
Mattb90
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Considering NASA's new rules, I'm guessing that the James Webb Telescope, which is set to replace Hubble in 2012 (which will now be 4 years after Hubble goes out of service) will be 'in range' of the ISS, so that any astronauts working on it will have the ISS as a safety net. Does this then suggest the same orbit for the telescope as the ISS, or at least a similar one?
And if so, does this not mean we are limited to low-orbits for telescopes we want to repair over time?
When JWST is at the second Lagrange point (see previous question), it will be out of reach of the Space Shuttle and repairs cannot be made once it has been launched. This also means that no provisions have to be made to allow astronauts to make repairs.
There's your economic reason.
-- Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Foreign nation
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Could a foreign nation collect hubble as space scrape and use it for it's own purposes. I have no idea about property rights in low earth orbit but i've seen tons of cheesy sci-fi movies that seem to support the possiblity:)
Re:Foreign nation
by
stratjakt
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
AFAIK, it'll cost more to maintain it (essentially rebuilding the thing in orbit) than it would to launch a new one.
--
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
New X-Prize Goal?
by
Glock27
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While far more ambitious than the first X-Prize, a privatized mission to save the Hubble would have vast implications for the advancement of spaceflight without the inertia and inefficiency of government. Perhaps robotic missions to a) boost it into a higher, safe orbit and b) at some later time replace the aging gyroscopes and other components.
Thoughts?
-- Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Re:New X-Prize Goal?
by
Esion+Modnar
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
a) boost it into a higher, safe orbit and b) at some later time replace the aging gyroscopes
It's space, but isn't it still a very hostile place to be, even for a space telescope? You've orbital junk, radiation, etc., so what is the "shelf life" of a space telescope, even in a higher, "safe" orbit?
So, how long can you wait to do maintenance, before it's just space junk?
--
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
A low for a NASA manager?
by
Stugots
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
"The documents (from the engineers) really did not go into the kind of depth and detail that we already had," Readdy said, who faulted the two engineers' reports for their "superficial" analysis.
This one sentence bloew me away. A NASA manager faulting an engineer for being superficial is just so funny.
Virtually every NASA disaster (and certainly the most emotionally distressing ones, with a loss of life) can be traced to management and not technical decisions.
NASA is full of... well, you know
by
rknop
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's all about politics. The safety issues are largely an excuse.
The amount of money that will be spent on an automatic de-orbiting rocket for the HST to overcome a 1-in-700 (yes, that small) chance of some *property damage* (not even human injury) is going to be huge. Which would seem to indicate an obsession with safety, but really at its core it is an obsession with PR. I simply cannot believe that there aren't engineers capable of coming up with a last-ditch backup plan should a spacewalk inspection of the shuttle servicing Hubble show that there is damage. (And they're going to be spacewalking anyway if they're going to Hubble; not a big deal to go take a look at the bottom fo the spacecraft.) There are other shuttles...!
-Rob
Re:NASA is full of... well, you know
by
rknop
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They are engineers. Thats what they do. Talk to a professional engineer or read up on professional ethics. Public safety superseeds costs.
Nothing is 100% safe. Otherwise we wouldn't launch the Shuttle at all. Otherwise you wouldn't leave your house every day.
If professional ethics prevented engineers from doing something that had a 1-in-700 chance of doing property damage, then no ethical engineer would design a road. I guarantee you that many people will die on highways in the next week. That's not a 1-in-700 chance of property damage somewhere in the world; that's a 100% chance of multiple human lives lost.
The risk of damage goes into the equation of costs. If any chance at all is unacceptable, then we can't ever do anything.
-Rob
Too much data?
by
laetus
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Can anyone answer this? These telescopes (both Hubble and Webb) can collect enormous amounts of data in relatively short periods of time.
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?
--
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Loss if credibility
by
kippy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How does NASA expect us to take it seriously with the new Moon/Mars push when it says that the Hubble repare is to dangerous. I'm pro-Mars but I'm betting it will be a lot more dangerous to do those manned missions than to fix Hubble.
If saftey is an issue now, won't it stop them later from doing everything they're promissing for the next 20 years?
Take it international
by
-tji
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The knowledge gained from the Hubble is certainly not a US-only thing.. Open it up to all nations to maintain it. I'm sure that among Japan and the various European contries they could get enough $$ to run a repair mission.
Obviously a bunch of humans jumping around and planting flags on the martian wasteland is worth more to mankind than the immense insights the Hubble telescope provided.
Each time the pictures from mars come back i ask myself "why the hell?". The sahara is more interesting. *FAR* more interesting.
Why not REALLY sell it as surplus?
by
spidergoat2
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Have they considered that perhaps another country might want to take it over for a few more years? Maybe India or Japan or England or another country would buy the rights and get some kind of value out of it. Oh, if you're paying attention George Bush, it might be a way to knock a few bucks off the national debt....
Whatever.
NASA = safety or bust
by
Dethboy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Basically I think in the future you'll see NASA shying away from anything even remotely risky.
"He added that Hubble offers no "safe haven" for astronauts seeking refuge from a damaged shuttle, while the ISS does."
Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?
It's space dammit. If you can't accept the risks then give the money to someone who does. Personally I'd fly to the freakin Hubble just so it can beam me back these bitching desktop images.
jim
Re:NASA = safety or bust
by
M-G
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?
Heh. Funny, but unfortunately, looks to be true. Crew safety should always be a high priority, but you can never eliminate risk.
Your car is a lot safer if you never leave the driveway, but you obviously won't get very far.
So when/if we go to Mars, are they going to be towing a little space dinghy behind them, or are we going to have to build a duplicate ship to fly alongside in case of an emergency?
The original decision to kill hubble wasn't made by a group but by one person, Sean O' Keefe. The official reasoning is that it's too risky to keep sending people up to do trivial things like maintenance because the shuttles are old and dangerous. The real reasoning is more likely along the lines of "if we lose another shuttle people will get fired over it."
If NASA was so concerned about safety then they would have learned from the original shuttle disaster.
The truth of the matter is that when you strap your ass to several kilotons of explosives with the intent of blasting yourself into orbit there is always the chance of fatality. Sure, the shuttles are old and rickety. We knew this 10 years ago. So, NASA. What have you been doing in the last 10 years about it? Answer: nothing.
The cost per shuttle in maintenance is amazing, but if you get rid of the shuttles in favor of something more efficient then you lose money and jobs. It's the same way any other monolithic government organization works - the more crap you put between yourself and the project = more money and jobs are created.
So, people. Are you willing to put people out of work to make a more efficient space program? Are you willing to get rid of the head of NASA because he likes his job and doesn't want to lose it? Would you do the same thing if you were in his position? Can you think of a way that you can maintain the job number and the influx of money while actually getting things done?
I'm not defending NASA, believe me. I work with people that work for NASA. They work 30 minutes a day and take 3 hour lunch breaks, just like the.com people did before the bottom of the market fell out. And we all know how much work got done then, don't we? Zilch. There's a reason why the running joke is that NASA is welfare for scientists. But then again, can you think of any alternatives?
Re:typical NASA
by
mike77
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I work with people that work for NASA. They work 30 minutes a day and take 3 hour lunch breaks...
I work for NASA myself, and I don't know who you work with, but the people who belong at NASA put in long hours. I put in 10 hour days on a regular basis. Admittedly I don't work at one of the major centers, but I find your generalization to be rather unfair to us folks who care. Sure there are poeple who do what you say, but I'd argue that's not the norm. Maybe it is for the pencil pushers, but the engineers and scientists I know work their asses off.
--
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
NASA's priorities are confused
by
dtjohnson
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Apparently, the Hubble mission is now considered too dangerous because there would be no backup shuttle available to rescue the Astronauts if their shuttle developed a problem. Space travel is inherently dangerous but the margin of safety with only one shuttle seems acceptable given the number of successful shuttle missions that have already been accomplished. It is financially and technically unrealistic to have a backup spacecraft available for every mission. The space station continues to be supported with the Soyuz capsule for which there is also no backup since the backup spacecraft docked at the space station was used by the last occupants to return to earth after the Shuttle crashed. The Hubble mission is far more important to science and mankind than the space station and should be given a very high priority by NASA. If NASA is unable to support a mission like Hubble, they need to ask themselves what their reason for even existing is.
combined with ISS
by
Major_Small
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
when I was reading the article, this thought came to mind: is there any way to append the hubble space telescope to the ISS? that way the astronauts can have a 'safe' place to stay if the shuttle is damaged, and the telescope can be fixed as soon as there's a problem...
Re:You're missing the point
by
Hays
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What? You're involved in keeping our astronauts safe and you think that there are ground based ultraviolet or infrared telescopes that are "even better than" hubble? That's distressing.
"It could probably survive and produce data for another 10 years, but at lower quality and much greater expense than we can get elsewhere." I'll thank you to tell me where else I can get my high quality infrared and ultraviolet observations (specifically on the wavelengths in which the atmosphere is opaque).
I am not in a position to evaluate the rest of your comments, but I'm skeptical of them now.
Re:Earth to NASA
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"It costs $1B to keep Hubble up. What programs are you going to bitch about being cut if that money is spent keeping an old small telescope in orbit?"
As posted elsewhere...
Cut foreign aid. Say, the $3+ BILLION per year that Israel gets. Go buy yourself a couple more Hubbles with that.
I won't bitch about that at all. Any more questions?
Re:Why not give it to DoD?
by
JungleBoy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Hubble was not the first space craft to fly that size lens. When hubble was being built, Lockheed already had the equipment to test and validate the lens. As we all remember, when Hubble was put into orbit, its lens was seriously flawed and a shuttle mission had to go up and add some 'contact lens' to correct it. Now why would NASA fly an unvalidated lens when the equipment existed to validate it? Lockheed offered to do it for them, but the test equipment was in the Skunk Works, so lockheed wouldn't let any of the NASA people in without fairly hi level security clearance. None of the NASA people had the clearance and NASA didn't want to cough up the money or wait the time required to get the clearance, so they just decided not to test the lens.
I'm sure the DoD has had very high resolution stuff flying for decades. My guess is that they resolutions higher than 1cm. I went to a few technical workshops down at JPL a year or two back. There was a software contractor there who worked for the DoD on extensions to the TIFF/GeoTIFF image formats. He said they have added extentions to the TIFF format to be able to store 1PB (Peta Byte) images in a tiff file (through internally virtual images/referenced data). Multiple times he made the comment that the earth at 1cm resolution is about 1PB.
I've talked to people who worked on the Agena satelites from the 60s into the 80s. He said that though he never say the target imagery, he did see some calibration imagry in the early 70s taken over the beaches of Southern California. And yes, he could tell if they person on the beach was a man or a woman, and if a woman whether she wasy laying face up or face down. This was in the early 70s!!.
At this point I'd put money on the DoD having a constalation of satellites with far higher resolution than Hubble. On the other hand, I'm sure hubble has very different types of sesor equipment then the DoD sats.
-- "You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Does Maritime Salvage apply to space?
by
devaldez
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If so, then whomever decides to go up and save the 'scope will be entitled to ownership...that doesn't necessarily give them access to communications methodology, but it is certainly more than a start.
Could PRC or Russia claim salvage rights?
dave
-- "... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
Is this the beginning of the end of Nasa?
by
cdn-programmer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Some people have proposed that this is the beginning of the end of NASA. There is quite a lot of merit in this idea.
First you redirect the efforts into a direction that is going to be hideously expensive. In order to achieve this goal you abandon pretty much everything else. Then when the elusive goals of landing a man on Mars clearly are seen for what they are - an expensive boondoggle - you simply abandon that project and since there is nothing else left you can shut down all of NASA.
The problem with this future for mankind - one firmly planted on earth - like the proverbial ostrich is this:
There is a lot of energy in space and it can be harvested quite inexpensively. This has been known for decades, but with oil and gas cheap and plentiful on planet earth - space based energy systems really never were explored, much less exploited.
This is now changing. Is it really cheaper to fight wars in the middle east than to harvest energy from space? What of the lives lost? Is it really the case that anonymous teenage boys dying in a desert in Iraq is ok because:"----" You fill in the blanks. With enough creativity pretty much anything can be justified.
--------------
The nuclear program was set back decades through carefully crafted fear mongering. The movie "China Syndrom" is an excellent example of this. I wonder how much influence wealthy Texas oil barons had in this. Their oil would not nearly have had the value it has were a strong nuclear energy industry around. So instead of cheap reliable energy, we end up with such a regulatory mess that even huge corporations are afraid to propose a reactor. The latest example of this is Exelon (EXC:NYSE) who invested with the South African firm, Escom, in the development of the pebble bed reactor. Clearly they felt that the manufactured opposition to nuclear power would be great enough that it is not feasible in the USA to consider building a plant, so they dropped the idea.
I personally think it is rather sad that the USA considers fighting a war so they can grab Arabian oil and gas is preferable to building safe nuclear power plants. But then what would a Canadian know of USA politics?
Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't seem inclined to play along with these mad ideas and France and South Africa as well as India, and several Asian countries have vibrant nuclear programs.
But even this is twisted in the USA disinformation machine. Under the guise of nuclear non-proliferation it is suggested that since a power plant can produce Plutonium, that nuclear energy is inherantly unsafe. Then the USA goes off and builds reactors specifically designed to produce the plutonium. While the rest of the world is told to not use nuclear as a source of energy the USA meanwhile builds and deploys an arsenal of weaponry that boggles the imagination.
Of course while all this is taking place, the peaceful use of nuclear power is discouraged because of the "long lived wastes which take centuries to decay". Of course, there is no real effort to develope scintillation technology that will burn the wastes and turn them into electricity, and in fact, the vast majority never even hear that such technology is possible!!!
How is this any different than the politics that took place when DuPont brought out synthetic fibers and meanwhile Congress passed legilation that outlawed Hemp? They were so crafty back then that they employed the spanish word Marijuana rather than the common English word - because they bloody well knew that if the average joe sixpack knew what they were up to that they would never get away with it!
But since then, how many kids have been jailed and have criminal records because of these insane laws? How many kids have now lost their parents and are growing up in foster care and orphanages because of the antics of the DEA?
--------------
Well - this story is about NASA and decommisioning the Hubble. I personally think we need to be very vocal about
Re:You're missing the point
by
Dashing+Leech
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
you think that there are ground based ultraviolet or infrared telescopes that are "even better than" hubble?
No, I don't think so, I know so. (Well, as long as I trust people, papers, and reports who are the actual experts in the field.) Adaptive optics have generated ground based designs that are several times better than Hubble in infrared. It's not hard to find journal papers on the subject, though I haven't seen them reported much in the press. I'm surprised you don't know about them.
This may not be true for all wavelengths that Hubble can see, but it is true for a large part of it.
Re:You're missing the point
by
shawn(at)fsu
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If I understand things correctly NASA has another spaced based telescope for infrared The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which is the is the fourth and final component of NASA's Great Observatories Program, which includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. I think this cry for the rescue of Hubble is more or less nostalgia for the past. Times change astronomy gets better and the tools get better. I have read many articles that talk about different techniques for lessening the effects of atmospheric distortion.
-- 500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Hubble Rescue and X-Prizes
by
BENAFARMER
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You know, Hubble Rescue might be a good subject for an X-Prize. I'd be willing to bet that there are companies out there that would be willing to give it a shot if they had a chance at $70-80 million--or maybe the prize could be ownership or operating rights to Hubble itself. Hmm. Liability would be a problem though. If something went haywire and Hubble landed on someone's SUV--Not good. What do think? Any potential here?
Re:Why not give it to DoD?
by
Buran
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Google for 'kh-12' and 'hubble' together, or 'kh-11' and 'hubble'.
Actually, that's depressing. We have several Hubble-type satellites up there that our government just flings up there whenever the hell it wants and it won't save the one that people actually care about!? Argh. As if I weren't furious enough...
Slashdot Mirror
Considering NASA's new rules, I'm guessing that the James Webb Telescope, which is set to replace Hubble in 2012 (which will now be 4 years after Hubble goes out of service) will be 'in range' of the ISS, so that any astronauts working on it will have the ISS as a safety net. Does this then suggest the same orbit for the telescope as the ISS, or at least a similar one?
And if so, does this not mean we are limited to low-orbits for telescopes we want to repair over time?
Mattb90
Editor, allaboutgames.co.uk
Could a foreign nation collect hubble as space scrape and use it for it's own purposes. I have no idea about property rights in low earth orbit but i've seen tons of cheesy sci-fi movies that seem to support the possiblity :)
Thoughts?
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"The documents (from the engineers) really did not go into the kind of depth and detail that we already had," Readdy said, who faulted the two engineers' reports for their "superficial" analysis.
This one sentence bloew me away. A NASA manager faulting an engineer for being superficial is just so funny.
Virtually every NASA disaster (and certainly the most emotionally distressing ones, with a loss of life) can be traced to management and not technical decisions.
It's all about politics. The safety issues are largely an excuse.
The amount of money that will be spent on an automatic de-orbiting rocket for the HST to overcome a 1-in-700 (yes, that small) chance of some *property damage* (not even human injury) is going to be huge. Which would seem to indicate an obsession with safety, but really at its core it is an obsession with PR. I simply cannot believe that there aren't engineers capable of coming up with a last-ditch backup plan should a spacewalk inspection of the shuttle servicing Hubble show that there is damage. (And they're going to be spacewalking anyway if they're going to Hubble; not a big deal to go take a look at the bottom fo the spacecraft.) There are other shuttles...!
-Rob
Can anyone answer this? These telescopes (both Hubble and Webb) can collect enormous amounts of data in relatively short periods of time.
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?
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
How does NASA expect us to take it seriously with the new Moon/Mars push when it says that the Hubble repare is to dangerous. I'm pro-Mars but I'm betting it will be a lot more dangerous to do those manned missions than to fix Hubble.
If saftey is an issue now, won't it stop them later from doing everything they're promissing for the next 20 years?
Blaze a trail to the New World
The knowledge gained from the Hubble is certainly not a US-only thing.. Open it up to all nations to maintain it. I'm sure that among Japan and the various European contries they could get enough $$ to run a repair mission.
Obviously a bunch of humans jumping around and planting flags on the martian wasteland is worth more to mankind than the immense insights the Hubble telescope provided.
Each time the pictures from mars come back i ask myself "why the hell?". The sahara is more interesting. *FAR* more interesting.
Have they considered that perhaps another country might want to take it over for a few more years? Maybe India or Japan or England or another country would buy the rights and get some kind of value out of it. Oh, if you're paying attention George Bush, it might be a way to knock a few bucks off the national debt.... Whatever.
Basically I think in the future you'll see NASA shying away from anything even remotely risky.
"He added that Hubble offers no "safe haven" for astronauts seeking refuge from a damaged shuttle, while the ISS does."
Oh good grief. What's next airbags and OnStar onboard the Shuttle?
It's space dammit. If you can't accept the risks then give the money to someone who does. Personally I'd fly to the freakin Hubble just so it can beam me back these bitching desktop images.
jim
The original decision to kill hubble wasn't made by a group but by one person, Sean O' Keefe. The official reasoning is that it's too risky to keep sending people up to do trivial things like maintenance because the shuttles are old and dangerous. The real reasoning is more likely along the lines of "if we lose another shuttle people will get fired over it."
.com people did before the bottom of the market fell out. And we all know how much work got done then, don't we? Zilch. There's a reason why the running joke is that NASA is welfare for scientists. But then again, can you think of any alternatives?
If NASA was so concerned about safety then they would have learned from the original shuttle disaster.
The truth of the matter is that when you strap your ass to several kilotons of explosives with the intent of blasting yourself into orbit there is always the chance of fatality. Sure, the shuttles are old and rickety. We knew this 10 years ago. So, NASA. What have you been doing in the last 10 years about it? Answer: nothing.
The cost per shuttle in maintenance is amazing, but if you get rid of the shuttles in favor of something more efficient then you lose money and jobs. It's the same way any other monolithic government organization works - the more crap you put between yourself and the project = more money and jobs are created.
So, people. Are you willing to put people out of work to make a more efficient space program? Are you willing to get rid of the head of NASA because he likes his job and doesn't want to lose it? Would you do the same thing if you were in his position? Can you think of a way that you can maintain the job number and the influx of money while actually getting things done?
I'm not defending NASA, believe me. I work with people that work for NASA. They work 30 minutes a day and take 3 hour lunch breaks, just like the
Apparently, the Hubble mission is now considered too dangerous because there would be no backup shuttle available to rescue the Astronauts if their shuttle developed a problem. Space travel is inherently dangerous but the margin of safety with only one shuttle seems acceptable given the number of successful shuttle missions that have already been accomplished. It is financially and technically unrealistic to have a backup spacecraft available for every mission. The space station continues to be supported with the Soyuz capsule for which there is also no backup since the backup spacecraft docked at the space station was used by the last occupants to return to earth after the Shuttle crashed. The Hubble mission is far more important to science and mankind than the space station and should be given a very high priority by NASA. If NASA is unable to support a mission like Hubble, they need to ask themselves what their reason for even existing is.
when I was reading the article, this thought came to mind: is there any way to append the hubble space telescope to the ISS? that way the astronauts can have a 'safe' place to stay if the shuttle is damaged, and the telescope can be fixed as soon as there's a problem...
What? You're involved in keeping our astronauts safe and you think that there are ground based ultraviolet or infrared telescopes that are "even better than" hubble? That's distressing.
"It could probably survive and produce data for another 10 years, but at lower quality and much greater expense than we can get elsewhere." I'll thank you to tell me where else I can get my high quality infrared and ultraviolet observations (specifically on the wavelengths in which the atmosphere is opaque).
I am not in a position to evaluate the rest of your comments, but I'm skeptical of them now.
"It costs $1B to keep Hubble up. What programs are you going to bitch about being cut if that money is spent keeping an old small telescope in orbit?"
As posted elsewhere...
Cut foreign aid. Say, the $3+ BILLION per year that Israel gets. Go buy yourself a couple more Hubbles with that.
I won't bitch about that at all. Any more questions?
Hubble was not the first space craft to fly that size lens. When hubble was being built, Lockheed already had the equipment to test and validate the lens. As we all remember, when Hubble was put into orbit, its lens was seriously flawed and a shuttle mission had to go up and add some 'contact lens' to correct it. Now why would NASA fly an unvalidated lens when the equipment existed to validate it? Lockheed offered to do it for them, but the test equipment was in the Skunk Works, so lockheed wouldn't let any of the NASA people in without fairly hi level security clearance. None of the NASA people had the clearance and NASA didn't want to cough up the money or wait the time required to get the clearance, so they just decided not to test the lens.
I'm sure the DoD has had very high resolution stuff flying for decades. My guess is that they resolutions higher than 1cm. I went to a few technical workshops down at JPL a year or two back. There was a software contractor there who worked for the DoD on extensions to the TIFF/GeoTIFF image formats. He said they have added extentions to the TIFF format to be able to store 1PB (Peta Byte) images in a tiff file (through internally virtual images/referenced data). Multiple times he made the comment that the earth at 1cm resolution is about 1PB.
I've talked to people who worked on the Agena satelites from the 60s into the 80s. He said that though he never say the target imagery, he did see some calibration imagry in the early 70s taken over the beaches of Southern California. And yes, he could tell if they person on the beach was a man or a woman, and if a woman whether she wasy laying face up or face down. This was in the early 70s!!.
At this point I'd put money on the DoD having a constalation of satellites with far higher resolution than Hubble. On the other hand, I'm sure hubble has very different types of sesor equipment then the DoD sats.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
If so, then whomever decides to go up and save the 'scope will be entitled to ownership...that doesn't necessarily give them access to communications methodology, but it is certainly more than a start.
Could PRC or Russia claim salvage rights?
dave
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
Some people have proposed that this is the beginning of the end of NASA. There is quite a lot of merit in this idea.
First you redirect the efforts into a direction that is going to be hideously expensive. In order to achieve this goal you abandon pretty much everything else. Then when the elusive goals of landing a man on Mars clearly are seen for what they are - an expensive boondoggle - you simply abandon that project and since there is nothing else left you can shut down all of NASA.
The problem with this future for mankind - one firmly planted on earth - like the proverbial ostrich is this:
There is a lot of energy in space and it can be harvested quite inexpensively. This has been known for decades, but with oil and gas cheap and plentiful on planet earth - space based energy systems really never were explored, much less exploited.
This is now changing. Is it really cheaper to fight wars in the middle east than to harvest energy from space? What of the lives lost? Is it really the case that anonymous teenage boys dying in a desert in Iraq is ok because:"----" You fill in the blanks. With enough creativity pretty much anything can be justified.
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The nuclear program was set back decades through carefully crafted fear mongering. The movie "China Syndrom" is an excellent example of this. I wonder how much influence wealthy Texas oil barons had in this. Their oil would not nearly have had the value it has were a strong nuclear energy industry around. So instead of cheap reliable energy, we end up with such a regulatory mess that even huge corporations are afraid to propose a reactor. The latest example of this is Exelon (EXC:NYSE) who invested with the South African firm, Escom, in the development of the pebble bed reactor. Clearly they felt that the manufactured opposition to nuclear power would be great enough that it is not feasible in the USA to consider building a plant, so they dropped the idea.
I personally think it is rather sad that the USA considers fighting a war so they can grab Arabian oil and gas is preferable to building safe nuclear power plants. But then what would a Canadian know of USA politics?
Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't seem inclined to play along with these mad ideas and France and South Africa as well as India, and several Asian countries have vibrant nuclear programs.
But even this is twisted in the USA disinformation machine. Under the guise of nuclear non-proliferation it is suggested that since a power plant can produce Plutonium, that nuclear energy is inherantly unsafe. Then the USA goes off and builds reactors specifically designed to produce the plutonium. While the rest of the world is told to not use nuclear as a source of energy the USA meanwhile builds and deploys an arsenal of weaponry that boggles the imagination.
Of course while all this is taking place, the peaceful use of nuclear power is discouraged because of the "long lived wastes which take centuries to decay". Of course, there is no real effort to develope scintillation technology that will burn the wastes and turn them into electricity, and in fact, the vast majority never even hear that such technology is possible!!!
How is this any different than the politics that took place when DuPont brought out synthetic fibers and meanwhile Congress passed legilation that outlawed Hemp? They were so crafty back then that they employed the spanish word Marijuana rather than the common English word - because they bloody well knew that if the average joe sixpack knew what they were up to that they would never get away with it!
But since then, how many kids have been jailed and have criminal records because of these insane laws? How many kids have now lost their parents and are growing up in foster care and orphanages because of the antics of the DEA?
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Well - this story is about NASA and decommisioning the Hubble. I personally think we need to be very vocal about
No, I don't think so, I know so. (Well, as long as I trust people, papers, and reports who are the actual experts in the field.) Adaptive optics have generated ground based designs that are several times better than Hubble in infrared. It's not hard to find journal papers on the subject, though I haven't seen them reported much in the press. I'm surprised you don't know about them.
This may not be true for all wavelengths that Hubble can see, but it is true for a large part of it.
If I understand things correctly NASA has another spaced based telescope for infrared The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which is the is the fourth and final component of NASA's Great Observatories Program, which includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
I think this cry for the rescue of Hubble is more or less nostalgia for the past. Times change astronomy gets better and the tools get better. I have read many articles that talk about different techniques for lessening the effects of atmospheric distortion.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
You know, Hubble Rescue might be a good subject for an X-Prize. I'd be willing to bet that there are companies out there that would be willing to give it a shot if they had a chance at $70-80 million--or maybe the prize could be ownership or operating rights to Hubble itself. Hmm. Liability would be a problem though. If something went haywire and Hubble landed on someone's SUV--Not good. What do think? Any potential here?
Google for 'kh-12' and 'hubble' together, or 'kh-11' and 'hubble'.
1 2. htm
j sd011017_1_n.shtml
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question529.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/kh11.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/kh-
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/jsd/
Actually, that's depressing. We have several Hubble-type satellites up there that our government just flings up there whenever the hell it wants and it won't save the one that people actually care about!? Argh. As if I weren't furious enough...
i am a soviet space shuttle