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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."
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.
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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?
Hasn't it discovered hundreds of new plants?
No.
KFG
And now what- we don't have the guts to fix Hubble? I think what this is really about is that we don't want to spend the money, that the head of NASA (O'Keefe is not even a scientist) is willing to bank on ground based telescopes under construction being able to fill in for what Hubble currently does (such as the almost burned observatory in Arizona). That is a dangerous, if not stupid, bet to be undertaking. Instead, we are going to throw our dollars at an improperly positioned space station that is doing trivial, not very important science and the search for life elsewhere in the solar system at a time when we are not technologically well equipped for such missions. We need to focus on near-Earth applications, going no further than the moon until we can bring down the costs and time needed to explore planets like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn for signs of life. I would rather obtain good astrophysics data than bad, inconclusive data about whether water existed in a crater on Mars many unspecified millions of years ago.
I could see them objecting to maintaining Hubble in favor of a better space telescope, or even "we haven't got enough money", but because there's a risk?
Is the idea at NASA that we should just not try something because there's a risk? I mean, is this the same agency that put men on the moon eleven years after being formed? Should I just not go to work tomorrow because I could get run down crossing the street?
What the hell happened to this country's can-do spirit?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
If its on, give it the time and funding it deserves. If its off, don't waste resources on it. This to and fro nonsense just wastes money that could be used elsewhere and increases the risks if a mission does eventually go ahead.
No one's willing to take risks or make a decision anymore. All we need is another damn shuttle disaster to slow everything down and have people screaming "its too dangerous to explore space - spend all your money down here".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yes, me too. I wholeheartedly support the future scientific discovery of cosmic shrubbery. /whoops
NASA's means of funding is to blame in this situation. Big science telescopes like Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer are one-off affairs. They get built and that is that. Hubble is an odd case because it has been serviced by the STS. The ISS on the other hand has to be constructed and launched, slowly. The contractors putting together ISS components make a lot of money billing the government.
The Shuttle's design didn't originally include solid fuel rockets. This was later made a requirement as part of a compromise aimed at lowering the Shuttle's design and flight costs. The company that designed and built the SFRs was called Morton Thiokol, now called Cordant Technologies, which was based in Utah. Coincidentally this company had strong ties to the NASA's adminsitrator James Fletcher.
Fletcher built up political support for the Shuttle by throwing some aerospace jobs to Utah. The first US politician to fly aboard the Shuttle was none other than Senator Jake Garn of Utah in April of 1985.
This is the same reasoning behind many of the ISS decisions. NASA can't build something like the ISS without pretty hefty funding from Congress. In order to get funding they have to promise jobs and/or money to the constituencies of the legislators they're asking for money. NASA's administration also knows that if they promise individual companies contracts they can get them to make said legislators happy by writing them nice big campaign checks. Almost all government projects are based around this favor bartering system.
Space telescopes aren't very lucrative contracts so it is hard to sell them to aerospace companies and Congress. The umpteen billion dollar ISS on the other hand is an easy sell as long as the construction can go as slowly as possible.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The problem with NASA is that it wants to be sexy rather than actually try and discover stuff. Looking for life on Mars is sexy. Looking into some obscure spectrum of something or other with a huge array of sensors located in Antarctica is not.
Despite the fact that every time we try and use a new way to look at stuff (some obscure spectrum of something or other, for example) we find a lot out there, NASA stopped building an array of sensors in Antarctica (which son of George H Bush that put the pressure on them to do this is left as an exercise to the reader). The reason is that the populace seems to like sending stuff somewhere. Seeing more just isn't cool anymore. The Hubble telescope will fall into disrepair because people don't like looking at stuff. They insist on touching it. Even if that means the stuff is more than a few orders of magnitude closer.
I guess I'll sum it up.
Going to Mars with a robat that touches stuff and messes around: SEXY
Looking at shit with a few big mirrors: NOT sexy
Help I'm a rock.
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
NASA did nearly the same thing towards the end of the Apollo program...They scrapped the last two lunar landings, even though ALL of the hardware was already built and ready to go, because they didn't want to staff the control room and fuel the rockets. It has been said that this was equivalent to crushing a brand new Rolls Royce which has never been driven simply because one does not want to pay for a tank of gas.
The astronauts have already said that they are willing to accept the very reasonable level of risk to fly the mission and repair the Hubble. It is terribly ironic that one of the few worthwhile shuttle missions of the last decade is scrapped because something MIGHT go wrong. They seemed perfectly willing to risk human lives to fly loads of fairly useless experiments just a couple of years ago. Nobody would argue that the shuttle has lived up to the lofty promises that NASA administrators made to Congress in order to get the funding for all of this in the first place. The shuttle, despite that fact the shuttle itself is reusable, has cost billions more dollars than equivalent rocket missions would have. In fact, one of the main selling points of the shuttle, that it could carry 20 tons into low earth orbit, is moot because the shuttle almost never flies with the maximum payload for safety reasons. The decision not to save one of the best scientific investments ever made is a slap in the face after all of the money which NASA has sunk into the shuttle program. The Hubble Space telescope has added tremendously to our knowledge of the universe and inspired a generation of young scientists and engineers. If any further proof was needed of the impotence and wrong headed thinking at NASA then this is surely among the most damning pieces of evidence. Let us hope that they make the right decision before it is too late.
During the proceedings (thanks C-SPAN!), it was quite evident that NASA was not giving a coherent reason for abandoning Hubble. NASA claimed that a mission to Hubble was unacceptably risky, while missions to ISS were not. The board pressed them on just how and why, and the increased risk seemed negligible for such a servicing mission.
However NASA was excited about sending an unmanned robotic mission to service Hubble, and they claimed that there were companies working on proposals to provide that robot.
My take was that this is the result of putting a non-scientist bean-counter (O'Keefe) in charge of NASA, coupled with an administration keen on cutting social funding while simultaneously funding private contractors as though there was no tomorrow.
The HST's data archive is currently about 12TB. That data lone is going to provide grounds for scientific papers well into the future. This data archive grows by about 2TB every year. That is a lot of data out of one instrument. There's a lot of good science left in that data. Letting that tremendous data source fall prematurly into the ocean because the HST was abandoned would be monumentally stupid.
There's also quite a bit of money and resources already devoted to the HST. Instruments and components have been built and paid for and the work is already done. Letting it sit on a shelf indefinitely would be a magnificent waste. Besides the money already spent a mission will have to be sent up, automated or not, to de-orbit the HST.
NASA ought to bite the bullet and push the envelope a little bit. It doesn't matter that they would be using untested technologies. Fixing the HST would be the test. I have little doubt that it would be feasible to robotically service the HST. A small cadre of tool laden AIBOs with rocket packs should be able to do the trick. If NASA is too scared to send people into space they could at least send a few cute robot dogs.
The technology and techniques learned with the HST could be applied later with the ISS' construction or even an in-orbit repair of a Shuttle or other craft. Maybe we could even start designing satellites that are meant to be services by robots to extend their useful lifetimes. Companies would be much more likely to invest in satellites if its potential operational life of 20+ years instead of 12 if everything goes alright.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I agree. Hubble has been able to take a licking and keep on ticking in superb fashion. Hubble is tried and true, so why scrap that old, faithful VW Beetle?
Now for those that say that Earth-based telescopes (EBTs) can now do an equal job, I don't believe that for a minute. No two ways about it, once light hits the athmosphere, it is scattered and some of it is irrevocably lost.
Here's another aspect that makes Hubble superior to EBTs: Hubble will never have a cloudy night.
Hubble is perfect for working in tandem with EBTs. I'm thinking the Deep Field Proyect: Hubble gets the clear image, finds an intriguing gap, and Hawaii's Keck is called into action to zoom in as deep as it can on those coordinates. And then, voilá, the most distant object ever pictured makes itself apparent. The people operating Keck would not have known where to point if it wasn't for Hubble. This is just one example of how Hubble keeps astronomers thinking outside of the box.
Also, any more servicing missions that Hubble gets from the Space Shuttle will only increase the know-how for future maintenance missions, as there is NOTHING that can replace on-the-job experience.
For many reasons, including pretty pictures, I believe the only thing that could possibly replace Hubble is another Space Telescope, and that's not in the near horizon, so let's keep Hubble, what do you say?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
3.1415926535897932384629
In case you're not aware: s/9$/6/
And don't ask why I know that off the top of my head . . .
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.
If NASA is not sure that shuttle can fly safely,
they should by one Soyuz from us, Russians.
Of course, Soyuz is technology of early 70'th,
but it would be newly manufactured, when shuttles are PRODUCTION of eithties. It is also order of magnitude cheaper. We fly space tourishs to ISS for $20millions or so.