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NASA Urged to Reconsider Shuttle Mission to HST
LMCBoy writes "Space.com reports today that the National Academies of Science has released its recommendation to NASA on the future of the Hubble Space Telescope. They conclude that 'NASA should take no actions that would preclude a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.' They also say that none of the safety requirements of the CAIB report preclude a manned servicing mission to HST." Read on for more.
"The NAS recommendation would reverse NASA's previous position that a shuttle repair mission is ruled out for safety reasons. In the wake of strong criticisms of this decision, NASA has also been considering a robotic repair mission. The robotic mission would not risk human lives, but it relies on a number of bleeding-edge technologies that would have to be deployed on a very short timescale. HST's remaining gyroscopes are not expected to last beyond 2007."
Safety concerns was the offical reason why they didn't want to service the Hubble, but this report most clearly is saying that's bunk.
But what about the finacial concerns? I don't think NASA has the funding to allocate to a Hubble Repair mission... could the safety claims just have been a smokescreen to cover when the real reason was because they can't get the funding to do this?
ahem. Well, one hundred anyway. In one fell swoop.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
And Hubble's second servicing mission cost $347 million plus another $448 million for the Shuttle flight - I believe that is in 1996 dollars.
So as a taxpayer, for all that dough, how 'bout some new satellite pictures of my house! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Whoa... since when are most scientists convinced that life likely came from Mars?
It's possible, sure. Even proven that the planets have swapped rocks many times, but "most scientists" ?
Personally, I'd find it quite spiffy if it turns out that life came from space originally... makes the mystery much more interesting.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
On the flip side, some glitz and glamour is also needed to keep the public interested, which interests politicians and helps them direct more money at NASA. Remember, NASA has to convince the government that it needs to be funded. The sexy projects have public appeal, and have more influence in this regard.
That's why nearly all NASA press-release packages have photos instead of spectral plots, even though astronomers probably use spectra more often than photos for most research. Photos are pretty and sexy, spectra look like boring stock-market plots.
But anyway, luckily enough scientists are influencing some of the politicians as well to keep Hubble funded (and other good projects too). That's part of the breaks of being government funded - you have to be useful as well as interesting.
make world, not war
No, StealthX20, we DON'T have ground-based telescopes that can do the things that Hubble can do. The no brainer is the ultraviolet, which cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere. There are more tasks, that depend on high-spatial resolution, that some ground-based telescopes can approach, but not match, at least not in all respects. The astronomical community would like to keep Hubble operating until its replacement is launched, but without a servicing mission that is unlikely, and hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent on new instruments to increase Hubble's capacity. That money will be wasted.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Here is one relevant link: Life on Earth could have come from a Mars rock Also check out NASA's Astrobiology Institute. Parent may have overstated the concensus on this issue, but he/she was certainly not incorrect that such theories are believed by quite a few people.
I suspect Hubble's CCD's can't really be compared to the ones in a digital camera.
From that same page: "They can see objects that are 1,000 million times fainter than the naked eye can see. "
For one thing, Hubble's cameras are cooled (can't find their temperature, but IIRC it's far below zero) to reduce noise. Also, the CCD design is bound to be different. This gives an idea of what's involved.
What a shame it would be to spend all that money putting Hubble up there and then not servicing it because of budget cuts. That would be like spending $20,000 on a new car and then deciding a few years later that you can't afford to take it in for an oil change. It's already up there, they might as well service it.
Hubble is in the 14th year of a 10 year mission. The decision to service hubble is no different than deciding to put a new engine in an old car with 200,000 miles, with the added twist that there is a 1 in 50 chance that a 7 person crew would die doing it. The reason NASA O'Keefe has decided not to service Hubble with the shuttle is that it is judged to be unsafe given the Columbia review board's recommendations. Namely, the shuttle should have access to the safe haven of the ISS if it is to keep flying. This story adds nothing new to the debate. Hubble's replacement is on the way. Perhaps its leisurely schedule of the James Webb Telescope can be accelerated.
an ill wind that blows no good
Well you know
56,000 miles is pretty impressive, but 160k miles it is not. So the Shuttle still has a couple of magnitudes advantage over our x-prize favorites.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
And the WFPC2 was installed in 1993, and was built about 1991. How many kilopixles did your digital camera have back then.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys, built between 1996 and 1999, was installed in 2000. It has a 4096x4096 pixel detector.
Where was your 16 megapixel camera in 1999?
The replacement for the WFPC2, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC), will also have a 4096x4096 detector, along with a 10Mpix IR detector. Both of these sensors are of much higher quality than a consumer CCD.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
For that sort of observatory, schedule is not a top priority. Nor was it for Hubble. Performance is so critical (and so difficult), that it's ready when it's ready - you just hope you can keep a lid on costs.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Yes, but the Hubble upgrades are like taking that 128k Macintosh and putting in a water-cooled dual G5 and a new LCD display. The newer cameras on Hubble, the WFPC3 and the NICMOS (i think), have proven worlds better than their predecessor instruments, literally. Hubble wasn't meant to be upgraded like that, but the engineers have figured out how to do it anyway. Think of the Hubble as a platform, not a single instrument.
Ideally, I would like to see several Hubble clones in solar orbit - capable of acting individually or as a very-long baseline interferometer.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
The risk to Hubble on a manned mission is fairly low. The risk to Hubble by entrusting it to an untested and today uninvented and yet-to-be-engineered robot is very high.
I agree with your general thread (that a manned repair mission is preferable because it has a higher probability of success), but to be fair, the robot is not yet-to-be-engineered. It exists, and it works. It was built by the Canadarm guys. It was meant to go up to ISS for remote work outside thespace station, but the HST guys kind of stole it from Greenbelt and moved it down to Cape Canaveral...
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
The problem, though is that there is very little research that is being done or can be done on the ISS. Currently, about 5% of the astronaut time is devoted to science. Take a look at the ISS science web page (you'll have to dig, it's buried - I think NASA is embarassed to show it) sometime, it's pathetic. One of the 'science' experiments is having the astronauts take digital camera pictures of the Earth through the windows, I kid you not.
The NSF did a study of the ISS a few years back and concluded that the station was utterly useless for science. Most of the things NASA claimed ISS would do can be done better on the ground and the rest were impossible because of the limitations in the station design. Since then, the ISS science capability has decreased even more.
Long duration human studies are nice but we already have lots of data from Mir for that. While newer studies are nice, it hadly seems worth the exorbitant price tag required to get that data.
Hubble is in the wrong place - it is inoperable for half the time, since the earth blocks its view as it orbits...
Huh? There is an hourglass shaped segment of the universe that Hubble can observe all the time, and careful scheduling can take care of a portion of the rest (it's that dance between the plane of hubble's orbit around the earth, and the plane of earth's orbit around the sun). This is not just a problem with Hubble, but with any space based telescope (until we can manage to put something into interstellar space anyway...). Even in a Lagrange point there will be times when some parts of the universe just won't be observable, when the sun, moon, or earth are in the way.
There is scheduling software that, factors all the orbital mechanics, and insures Hubble's time is as well used as it can possibly be. Not a moment of its time is wasted if it can be humanly avoided. Not only is its time expensive, it is intensely sought after by astronomers.