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Hubble Snaps Farthest / Oldest Galaxy
starannihilator writes "Astronomers use gravitational lensing, a magnifying effect caused by the gravity / mass of galaxies, to capture images of the farthest / oldest galaxy known - from when the universe was just 750 million years old. Stories from the BBC,
Sign On San Diego, West Hawaii Today, or
Mercury News."
Yay! Even more reasons to keep this guy around! It's a damn shame they want to deorbit Hubble. With this much invested into a telescope that STILL continues to function fine, why not just open it up for other uses rather than deorbit it?
While I have seen hundreds of "discovered by Hubble this week" I have not seen one discovery in the news come from the station. It's usually fighting with the Russians or announcing it's going to cost ten times more than we thought to do one twentieth the science.
I'm sorry but this is just nonsense.
I am personally involved with some experiments conducted in ISS, and I know there is a lot of important research going on there.
Just because ISS does not have a PR department that hypes up every other little discovery as is happening for hubble, and because it doesn't give you pretty pictures but complex scientific output, you have no argument for saying there is no research going on in that place
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
I understand the stupidity of de-orbiting Hubble, and I do think NASA should extend its life a little longer by doing the service mission. But don't you think all the sentimental slashdot comments is a little too sentimental? Just maybe Hubble is getting old, and it's time to put up a new telescope for replacement (hopefully or eventually)?
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Why doesn't the ISS have a PR department, or at least some form of publicity for the research that's going on.
Well, other than the fact that a lot of scientists are getting their shit in knots over the idea that someone may steal thier research data and put it to a practical use before they can.
You want to keep the public's eye on the benitits of the station, rather than the cost, or the latest stupid problem.
Hubble needs this sort of thing to keep it serviced. This is very interesting and in my mind at least partially justifies Hubble.
A better space telescope is in the works, and it is scheduled for launch as early as 2007.
Why risk 50% of our remaining space shuttle fleet, another human crew, and untold billions to repair Hubble at this point?
A few years gap won't kill science or the stars. I mean... for all of human history except for the 14 years that Hubble has been in service we had no equivalent of Hubble. What's another 3-4 years when we've already missed 11.2 billion years?
Yeah, but who considers most of the representatives informed?
It's not for the preresentatives that the PR is needed, it's for the public. it's easy for them to dismiss the ISS, because they know very little of what is being done up there. And the public, should have some weight with thier representative... at least if the representative wants to sit in his comfy chair past next time the election rolls around.
James Webb doesn't cover the same spectrum that Hubble does. Visual and UV will be completely ignored by it. No replacement for Hubble is in the works, and UV coverage can't be obtained from Earth-based telescopes. This has been well-covered before -- please inform yourself before you recklessly cast aspersions on a space project in typical sissy fashion.
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently.
We have 3 space shuttles and have lost two in 18 years.
On top of that, a replacement will be ready sometime in 2007.
The current timeframe is a 2011 launch, and that is expected to be pushed back signifigantly, due to development and technological issues.
The Hubble is failing, and requires massive, extraordinary measures to save it.
The Hubble requires routine scheduled maintenance.
I think you are ignorant and mal-informed as to what the real reasons behind the NASA decision is.
You are the one who is ignorant and mal-informed if you think the real reason behind this decision is anything other than money.
You can't have it both ways.
Listening to O'keefe on a press conference about a month ago, when he addressed the Hubble issue in detail, it all became clear to me: It's pure politics.
After the CAIB, he was blasted, questioned and doubted to no end, so what does a skilled polititian do? cut your losses and move on. Well, he did just that. So now he's gonna follow the CAIB like it's the road to salvation. To the letter.
The CAIB puts forward a number of requirements for shuttle flights, including the ability to service the Shuttle via ISS if something goes wrong...among a host of other "inconvenient" requirements.
O'keefe decided to follow the CAIB to the letter so that means that going to the hubble will "break the laws" of the CAIB (Hubble is in an entirely different, incompatible orbit...still you'd think that being the thing called SHUTTLE it shouldn't be an issue, but it is)
So servicing the Hubble will violate his mandate to play it safest and thus it won't happen because it's "too risky" according to the CAIB mantra.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I'm coming increasingly to believe the space station is a bit of a dead duck and the issues that prevented the location of ISS in a higher orbit should have been addressed, so that it could do something really useful - like being a base where servicing missions can start and end from.
Then one would deliver a true shuttle which would flit between ISS and whatever hardware needed upgrading. Fuel and personel would be delivered to the space station alone as a starting and ending point.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Bullshit. HST is among the most productive astronomical facilities ever, measured in publication and citation count ( analysed here). HST data is typically used in more than 150 peer-reviewed papers a year. These are papers in journals such as Astrophysical Journal, Science, and of course Nature. A simple seach of the Science archives show 68 original research publications with "Hubble Space Telescope" in the text since 1995. A similar search for "International Space Station" returns ZERO hits. A search of the Nature website returns an interesting article: " Biologists recommend scrapping NASA's research on crystals" (Nature394, 213 (16 Jul 1998)) that starts out: "A panel of US biologists has called for an end to protein crystallography experiments in space -- one of the highest-profile research activities..."
The fact that the general public is fairly deluged by pretty HST pictures is in addition to the fact that the astronomical community is using HST very actively; it's not an artefact of some PR department.
Don't get me wrong - I think manned spaceflight, and the space station are good things, and should be funded. But let's be honest here; HST blows ISS out of space when it comes to publications and scientific impact.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
You're right, there's risk involved. The question is which projects do you decide to spend the remaining shuttle flights on? Do you continue to pour money down an ISS rat hole that has delivered ZERO peer-reviewed science, has no reason to exist other than pork barrel or do you allocate the flights to maximizing the remaining science?
NASA has already killed Compton, is on its way to killing Hubble and you think O'Keefe and gang will fund Webb? Perhaps you didn't notice, Webb has already been scaled back twice - the ISS money vacuum will continue to wreak its damage. Other posters have already pointed out that Webb and Hubble are not interchangeable - they see different spectrums.The problem is is that NASA will continue to lose public support if its only reason to exist is to fly the Shuttle back and forth between ISS. The ISS has no value other than job creation. Hubble on the other hand, provides both jobs and real science - the kind of science that gets published in Science and Nature. ISS science is the kind of science you find at the local county science fair, i.e., "What color does my dog like?"
Your post and O'Keefe's decision to kill Hubble clearly illustrate how poorly educated this country is. Equating Hubble and Webb and choosing ISS over Hubble are examples of what happens when half our children aren't taught science well enough to know that it takes a year for the earth to circle the sun. The cost of that poor education is you get people like O'Keefe running Nasa and the public doesn't know enough to say boo about it. We've lost the super collider, we're going to lose Hubble, 50/50 Webb will not fly, manufacturing, accounting, customer service and software have been outsourced but we'll have a worthless missile "defense" and plenty of boobies on fark.com. That's the cost of poorly educating people.
Keck was used for high res spectroscopy. It takes hours to get a single spectrum of something this dim. You could find these efficiently using Keck in a survey mode. Keck and HST complement one another quite while (as does the VLT and Gemini). JWST was meant to work wel with HST/Keck too by allowing yet another wavelength range to be examined at very loew sensitivities.
The mistake made by some politicians and non-scientists is that they think that there must be a "best telescope" one can build to do ALL science. This is wrong.
IF we had a permanent base on the moon AND a lunar-based telescope, we'd have exposures of up to two weeks long!
BUT if Bush's plan is only a political game to win votes in Florida and Texas, we might as well try to make NASA change its mind on Hubble.