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Astronauts, Robots to Save Hubble
BungoMan85 writes "Astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope, among others, feel that NASA's administrator Sean O'Keefe shouldn't be too quick to abandon the now 14 year old space telescope because of safety concerns arising from the Columbia disaster." And an anonymous reader writes "At the insistance of congress, NASA is looking for a way to save the Hubble. "It's the most unpopular decision I could have made," Sean O'Keefe said of his decision to cancel the shuttle mission planned to fix Hubble. He has authorized his engineers to pursue the possiblity of a robotic rescue mission. This could be a great opportunity for private industry contractors."
The "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" was supposed to maintain the International Space Station. Didn't work, but total spending was somewhere around $50 million before Congress pulled the plug.
Read the article. The cancelled mission was not just to service the telescope in terms of maintenance, it was also to install new instruments worth $167 million as an upgrade.
If they can upgrade what's already there to new technology, why launch a new one? I'm sure the idea of replacing it completely has been considered and the costs weighed.
I know the Hubble telescope has done some great science, but shouldn't we just let it go so we have more money to put up the next generation telescope?
No, we should not just let it go, especially not when we've already spent $200 million on the instruments that are supposed to be installed in the next mission. HST is quite possibly the greatest scientific instrument anyone's ever built. You don't just throw it away unless you really have to.
Or is this really about hating Bush's attempt to bring a man to Mars, and undermining it anyway possible just because he's Bush?
Look, no one believes that Bush is serious about a manned mission to Mars, least of all the man himself. His proposed reshuffling of the NASA budget to pay for it is sub-laughable.
I can't see why people are suddenly spendthrift when a Republican president wants to do something, but we can spend billions on welfare and hike taxes up to strangulating levels without anyone complaining under a Democrat.
Please, get serious. What are these "strangulating" tax levels you are talking about, and under whose administration did they occur? If you look at this page, you'll see that tax rates have not appreciably changed since 1980. In fact, that same chart will show you that most people's taxes were actually lower in 2000, when the Man You Love To Hate left office, compared to 1992, when he took office.
Maybe people seem spendthrift because the Bush administration is mangling our budget with explosive spending programs coupled with irresponsible tax breaks for the rich. This results in (suprise, suprise) huge deficits which our children's children will be paying for. This isn't "just party politics"; fiscal conservatives are crying foul about Bush Economics as well.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Also, the Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope isn't quite a replacement for Hubble. It won't be launched until 2012, does not see in quite the same region of the spectrum and will be sitting at L2, well out of the range for servicing.
One of the things that has made the Hubble truely unique is the ability to be serviced. Each service mission has improved the telescope's capabilities tremendously. The Webb, for all its grandure, once it is up, it is up. No serviceing mission to bolt on a new camera, no trips to fix the optics. What we get day 1 is what we get day 100 and day 1000.
In the meantime, we will have at least six years without an optical range space telescope. That's six years of supernovae, six years of gamma ray bursts, six years of star formation, six years of light echos and six years of deep field astronomy that simply WILL NOT HAPPEN.
This is rediculous. Fix the damned telescope.
200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
This is actually a logical falacy. I learned about this in a decision theory class I was in for a while at Cornell University. Previous investments should not directly affect economic decisions like this, only the current situation. That is, just because we spent lots of $$$ to make Plan A work does not mean we should continue with Plan A even if Plan B does the same thing for less additional money.
Imagine that you buy a truck for $10000. You then end up putting several more thousand dollars into it for repairs (like we did with the hubble). You even got a nice big turbocharger to put on it for when it's fixed next... however you get a bill saying it'll cost $4000 to fix the truck. And it's getting old. And lets say truck technology has advanced so much that for $4000 you can get a nice brand new truck that's even better. Rational decision-making dictates you would purchase the new truck - despite how much money you put into it in the past.
I'm not suggesting that we currently have an alternative to Hubble that does the same thing for a better price, however previous investments SHOULD NOT dictate our policies, only the current scientific/economic facts.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA/JPL, but as a software engineer.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
No, it's not really that possible or easy. It would take a lot of energy to change orbits that radically. Things don't go around the Earth at the same height (and I'm not talking a few hundred feet, either) the same direction (angle), and for that matter, the same speed. Hell, some orbits are highly eliptical and some are circular. To match an orbit with an object you pretty much have to launch into that orbit. Slight corrections can be made in-flight, like moving up close to it, but this also pushes you to a higher altitude due to your increased speed. Likewise, if you slow down, you tend to fall as well. The Hubble is quite a ways out there IIRC, now imagine the ISS being on the other side of the planet when the crew needs to get there, and you quickly see how this becomes pretty impossible. Unfortunate, but that's physics for ya.
PS: Gratuitous rant about America becomming more tightwad'd every day has been *BAHLEETED!*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?