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Hubble's Deepest Pictures Yet
MrBook2 writes "NASA have just released the Ultra Deep Field (UDF). This image took 800 exposures and clocked in at 11.3 days (!) of exposure time. This image is deeper than the Hubble Deep Field which has yielded a vast amount of knowledge. So, why exactly was it that NASA wanted to scrap the Hubble?"
How close is this to the "edge" ? Is it what we expected to see. Please, give a layperson like me some wowie zowie facts and figures :)
Pictures like this evoke strong and polar opposite emotions in me. On the one hand I am excited to see such beautiful images. I can't help but think there is life out there somewhere in all those galaxies (OK, maybe those really deep field galaxies are still too young to have life).
On the other hand, I am deeply depressed by these pictures because I know (to many 9s of certainty) that I shall never be able to visit these places. Seeing these galaxies makes them seem close enough to touch. Yet they remain so unreachable. SIGH!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A close friend of mine is an astronomer in Arizona and her primary means of gathering data is the Hubble. She recently accepted a position in Colorado to continue her work with Hubble data and a new instrument called COS planned to be placed on Hubble. Since NASA's announcement, though, the COS portion of the project has been put on hold and COS funding has lost about $1 million.
A bipartisan resolution was recently introduced in Congress to save the Hubble, a move highly supported by the Mars Society. I don't think NASA needs to be the sole financial basis for maintaining the Hubble, however. The telescope is valuable enough to private research facilities -- and still a viable platform for upgrades -- that the primary source of funding could come from them.
because they are *morons*... my wife is an astronomer and i have a lot of friends in the field. everyone seems outraged by this... it seems as if there are simple "marketing" reasons for scrapping the hubble telescope:
1. talking about a deep field image is not as entertaining for the common american as talking about a man on mars.
2. the shuttle is the weak link here. two have exploded so far. you need to service the telescope once in a while. currently nobody wants to hear the word shuttle, so why should we then service it?
not to mention that the telescope is modular and you can always install new instruments, i.e. it can live long and prosper...
what pisses me off most is that ther are several types of observation which you can *only* do from space. if hubble is scrapped, then several astronomers will be rather unhappy and unable to do their job. not to mention that hubble has provided amazing insights into space. the argument from NASA that it is too expensive to service it is BS. it's just that they are having a hard time to sell their budget in general and so they need to focus on more popular topics. now you might say: well, who cares about hubble. the new generation space telescope, james webb, is around the corner! well, it is not. first, it will sit in a lagrange point in space (cool idea!!!) which is rather far away and so impossible to service if something breaks. and at this point i would like to remind you the faith of beagle 2 as well as the problems hubble had at the beginning (mistake in mirror). how shall we fix such problems on JW? in addition, JW telescope will be launched in 2011... and we all know that realistically it wont happen till 2015. so if hubble gets trashed in 2007, what will we do? why put all cards on JW if hubble is still perfectly functioning and generating the most amazing data? makes you wonder...
as for the ultra deep image: amazing! i wonder how much it costs to use the hubble for ~ 11 days...
I understand that the deep field is a narrow view, but could somebody please explain the straw length calculation. Why 8 foot instead of 7 or 1?
Thanks in advance.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Why must Hubble die? It's producing too much science, and not consuming enough pork dollars.
End of story. Hubble will die, we'll build a reusable shuttle that still can't go beyond low earth orbit, we'll spend tens of billions turning the existing shuttles into unmanned cargo lifters inferior to present unmanned launch vehicles, and we'll do it all to preserve the ISS.
Vote for me! I promise a chicken in every pot, a subcontractor in every district! And no pesky science to get in the way of your religious beliefs!
Amen to that.
Really really glad I got out of the states for a while, maybe longer.
None of my money went to the war crime of dispersing one micron depleted uranium mixed in with transuranics (military waste stream) in the bunker busters used on urban targets. I have 4 friends who saw the childrens oncology wards in Basra in the mid 1990's as the wave of childrens kidney cancers and certain specific leukemias started popping up.
Five six years from now there will be a new wave of childrens cancers in Iraq. (Also Kosovo and Afghanistan.)
Other friends of mine just got back from Iraq via Christian Peacemakers team. Bechtel is building five huge military bases and probably building it halfway decent. However their contract to rebuild and renovate schools can only be characterized as theft.
No money for Hubbell but lots of money for Bechtel and Halliburton.
It was really really nice to send my tax dollars to Canada, where they need bake sales to help finance their military.
Shalom,
Is that most of the images get imaged processed to death. Without Kalman filtering and deconvolution algorithms they would look lame, and these algorithms can be done to images taken from Earthbound telescopes.
The high-redshift objects observations like this are intended to uncover have effectively no emission in the visible band by the time their light reaches Earth. What Earthbound telescope did you have in mind to produce this high-redshift infrared imaging?
Because the optical is boring.
To some degree, this is true. But the UV spectrum is *very* interesting, as it can be used for, amongst other things, detecting organic compounds in distant objects. Well, guess what, the JWST doesn't cover UV, either, and neither does any other telescope currently available, since the UV is only reachable from space.
The fact is, the Hubble and JWST instruments are *complementary*. The Hubble can still do a lot of valuable science, and shutting it down for supposed budgetary reasons is just plain silly, IMHO.
2.4 meters (all the usual references) isn't all that big by 2004 standards. Hubble has the best sensors money can buy, and operates in the perfect seeing of space, but its performance is (and will always be) limited by its small aperture.
Others have mentioned adaptive optics, but what excites me is optical interferometry.
...laura
Because NASA says that it costs too much to maintain, and it's getting close to its estimated end of life date.
As reported recently in the news, this was refuted by two independent engineering teams *within NASA*. At which point NASA changed its tune and said that servicing the Hubble was too dangerous for the astronauts.
Although recently *another* leak from inside NASA claimed that repairs to the Hubble were no more dangerous than any one of the 25 planned missions to complete the space station.
There doesn't seem to be a good reason to abandon Hubble. Which makes me think that the real reason has far more to do with politics and budget appropriations than anything else.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Oh, come on! The Shuttles are hardly "deathtraps"!
Before the Columbia accident, the estimated critical failure rate for Shuttle missions was 2%. The CAIB revised this, to 2%. Yes, that's right, their investigation found that the previous failure estimates were correct. In other words, our understanding of the danger inherent in shuttle missions has not changed at all since before the accident, only our willingness to face the danger has changed.
Why? I don't know. There's no shortage of astronauts willing to take the same risks they've always taken, and fly another HST servicing mission. They recognize the benefits in keeping the greatest scientific instrument we've ever produced healthy. Too bad NASA and the president do not. I sincerely hope that our lawmakers can salvage the mission.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I like the Hubble, but I've feeling an orbit boosting won't do much good. I don't know exactly how many working gyroscopes are left on board, but I think only one or two more can break before Hubble is useless unless they are replaced. They are at the end of their expected lifetime, but lets hope that they can last out for a lot longer.
MacOS X, I've upped my standards, Up Yours...
While the Hubble is old, your argument isn't really that persuasive. The optics and superstructure of Hubble still sork fine and are as good as anything we'd put up now with the same general configuration. The aborted Hubble repair mission contains an entire new set of cameras and pointing control devices. BTW, we already spent $400 million on these and they're now gathering dust in a NASA warehouse somewhere. With that upgrade, Hubble would have been upgraded to the latest modern optics and the gyroscopes upgraded to where we'd probably be able to get 5-10 years of useful life out of it.
The James Webb telescope in certain ways is much better than Hubble because of the larger mirror but can't see in the blue and UV which is OK if you're looking at distant, redshifted stuff but useless for looking at a lot of intergalactic events including some star formation processes. Furthermore, the biggest limitation of the space telescopes is one of time - we've got scads of ground based telescopes that users can schedule time on. For space-based telescopes, we've only got a few and the waiting lists are long. If we've got two telescopes, it basically doubles the number of users and science that can be done. Things like this UDF shot are hard to do since the 11 or so days of exposure that it required are hard to get with all of the competing time requirements.
The line about Hubble being too dangerous to service are bunk as well. Although the spacewalk portions of the repair are hazardous, there has never, to my knowledge, been any sort of incident during a spacewalk. That seems to indicate that it is not devastatingly hazardous. Also, the ISS is actually much more dangerous to get to due to its higher inclination. Furthermore, the 20 or so further Shuttle flight needed to finish it have a vastly higher cumulative risk. The ISS is basically incapable of doing meaninful science at this point. The NSF did a study about 5 years ago where it pointed out that ISS was either incapable of fufilling its science objectives or that they could be done better on the ground. Since then, the science capability of ISS has been reduced even more. Basically, ISS is a $20 billion project to keep the US shuttle contractors in work and to keep Russian aerospace engineers from going to 3rd world ICBM programs. As such, it's not a bad use of money since the cost of those Russian engineers going abroad in terms of military expenditures we'd have to do 10 years from now are much higher. However, that said, I'd rather that our military welfare not step on the toes of actually getting science done.
And lastly, the most important reason to keep Hubble running is that the Webb telescope isn't operating yet. It uses an folding mirror which has never been operationally tested. It sits too far away from Earth to ever be serviced should it have a malfunction. What if the booster lofting Webb blows up? If we deorbit Hubble, we open ourselves up to having NO space based optical and near IR telescope. We should at least service Hubble to keep it running until Webb is up and running reliably.
I don't understand why everyone is getting so bent. The year after they lower Hubble into a firey grave they are planning on launching a replacement observatory that is supposed be considerably more powerfull. Sure it was the first to show us deep space but it is after all expendable and was never planned on being used for a few years anyway.
Yes, really. You know, radio observatories have been publishing for decades images that have higher angular resolution than Hubble. In fact, the VLBA (the Very Long Baseline Array) still outperforms Hubble in terms of angular resolution. Yes, it is true that the VLT can produce images with adaptive optics that are as sharp as the Hubble's.
HOWEVER, angular resolution is not everything! Hubble gives astronomers access to areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that ground-based observatories cannot access because of the Earth's atmosphere. Also, the field of view of AO images is tiny. Read the comments to any Hubble story, and you will see this theme over and over and over again. Some of Hubble's capabilities are unique. The JWST will not duplicate many of these unique capabilities, and NO telescope on the ground or in space can duplicate some of the science made possible by Hubble.
Just FYI, there is currently no safe plan for deorbiting Hubble. It has NO retros. It steers based completely on reaction wheels which are incapable of altering the orbit, they can only repoint the scope.
So, some kind of mission to the scope is going to be necessary if it's to be safely de-orbited. And if we're going there anyway, and we have new equipment ALREADY BUILT for it, why not bolt on the de-orbit retros, and at the same time put in the new equipment and reboost it, and get another 5 years out of the old dog?
As many other people have pointed out elsewhere, hubble has a 2m DIFFRACTION-LIMITED primary mirror. You work out the resolution. 1.22*lambda/diamter. This is still far better than the best astronomical sites (seeing at mauna kea and paranal gets down to about 0.5 arcsec at best). Even with adaptive optics, you're not gonna get there. So no, a ground-based telescope won't get you the same result.
Add to this, that hubble can get into the near UV, which is almost completely absorbed by the atmosphere.
You seem to be trying to describe and interferometer, which is a _completely_ different instrument and there is absolutely NO WAY an optical interferometer would work over such enormous baselines. 100m is really hard. thousands of kilometres? forget it!
Look at the age of the shuttle and most of the military jets the US uses these days. Other than a few exceptions there isn't an airframe that was developed less than 30 years ago. It is the logical time now to maybe cut back on the science a bit and put some more money into developing capability, as we are now hitting the edge of how far some of the technologies can be pushed, that were developed during the last big aerospace subsidies from the 60's.
http://ehpg.net/~cradly/jpg/hudf-3200x1200.jpg
http://ehpg.net/~cradly/jpg/hudf-1600x1200.jpg
http://ehpg.net/~cradly/jpg/hudf-1280x1024.jpg
http://ehpg.net/~cradly/jpg/hudf-1024x768.jpg
http://ehpg.net/~cradly/jpg/hudf-800x600.jpg
Senator Barbara Mikulski is also leading some efforts in the Senate as well as a Maryland Delegation, and has a response from O'Keefe.
On the house side we have picked up 5 more co-sponsors.
Ehlers
Markey
Inslee
Cummings Jim Moran
http://SaveHubble.org could use some help with our efforts to poll all of congress on the Hubble issue!
I've wondered that myself.
I would hope, at least, that they would improve the electronics and construction materials. Lots of advances in those field since Hubble was designed & built two decades ago.
Doing so is probably not trivial, but it's not a full redesign either.
Heck, with the advances in manufacturing, we could probably get three new Hubbles for the price of one. I bet there's a lot of astronomers/astrophyscists out there who'd give a lot for better access to a Hubble.
Now what would really be interesting is if NASA could hold a public fundraiser to offset costs and launch a Hubble II that would allow access by amateur astronomers...
Oh, and the Ultra DF is amazing. I thought the first Deep Field was astounding, but this one
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.