Slashdot Mirror
No Money For Hubble Service Mission
starexplorer writes "SPACE.com is reporting that the White House has eliminated funding for servicing the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request. After many options 1, 2 were explored, is this the death knell for Hubble?"
The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to fly in 2011.
The problem arises from the fact that Hubble will die without servicing before then.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
As soon as it gets to the point where it becomes a re-entry risk (which happens when only one gyro remains functional), NASA will drop it into the Pacific. They don't want to risk an unplanned, uncontrolled descent that may put it in the middle of a population area.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The problem is that eventually, the gyroscopic stabilizers will wear out, and it will be unable to move.
Not really unable to move, but unable to be controlled.
Not to mention Hubble and JWST don't see all the same frequencies on the radiation spectrum, so even once JWST goes up, we won't be able to see everything Hubble could.
The JWST was meant to complement the Hubble, not replace it. It functions almost entirely in the infrared range, whereas Hubble covers a very wide range of wavelengths. The JWST was intended to fill in one of the HST's weak points.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
After the Challenger disaster, plans to bring the Hubble back were dropped. Landing the shuttle with that much weight was found to be too risky.
After the Columbia accident, going to Hubble to repair it or deorbit it with a space shuttle was found to be too risky.
The Hubble was designed back when the shuttles were believed to be far more robust and expected to have a bit more carrying capacity. Going from the drawing board to a flight-worthy vehicle with a design that managed to be both revolutionary and out-of-date resulted in some difficult problems.
Eventually (as the Estes catalogs taught us in the late '60s) reusable is the way to go. But with the current state of engineering and finances, the Russians are doing a lot better with big, dumb, reliable, mass-produced single-use vehicles.
We desperately need a new space vehicle system that's safe, versitile, and cheap in terms of the cost of kg. to orbit. The new system is doable engineering wise, but probably dead politically.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
University of Arizona is building the Large Binocular Telescope [http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbtwww/], with with a pair of mirrors each 8.4 meters (25 feet) in diameter. The light gathering power and sharpness are both supposed to put Hubble to shame [ see http://www.nd.edu/~science/core/binocular/lbt_othe rtelescopes.shtml]
using adaptive optics to remove the atmospheric blurring. It's a lot cheaper than Hubble, and while being ground-based has limitations, having it on the ground will make it much easier to repair and upgrade.
Except that HST has been one of NASA's most wildly popular missions ever. Probably more popular than, say, Cassini. Or MESSANGER, Deep Impact, or Rosetta. It's only rivals from the current era are the Mars rovers.
Be careful about generalizing your likes and dislikes to the rest of the world.
Yes, a newer and better one is on the horizon. The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in 2011.
More like a new and different one. If you actually compare the two you'd notice that the JWST doesn't see everything the HST can, not even close to the same wide range of spectrum. It sees primarily in IR.
- AMW
Not all the money was private; DC had to spend $17 million on the inaugural. Historically, these costs have been reimbursed by Congress through a special appropriation; this time, however, the Bushies have told DC to use their Homeland Security funds; after all, it's not like DC's a likely terrorist target.
Hubble has been crucial in imaging Supernova 1987A. We have an astonishing volume of data from the Hubble as we follow the sequence as this progresses in the Greater Magellenic Cloud. If Hubble is lost without any replacement, we will lose a rare opportunity to image a supernova this close.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
In other words, this could just be a gambit to drum up support and funding from congress.
Hatred for America is unavoidable. The world hates America.
Spend all your education budget on bombs and weapons, go ahead. We all despise you already. Spend all your research budget on bullets, give your children the right to buy guns, the world watches as you spout your hipocracy.
You don't know the meaning of the word freedom. You are a sick joke.
A few people have suggested launching something very similar to HST, with the new instrumentation that was supposed to go up in servicing mission 4. One such proposal is the "Hubble Origins Probe"; they had a poster at the last American Astronomical Society meeting, the abstract of which you can read here.
..." (COS and WF3 are the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and new Wide-Field Camera, respectively.)
That abstract begins, "A no-new-technology HST-class observatory with COS and WFC3 as its core instruments
There's also a brief article about this at New Scientist.
I'm not crazy about this idea, for a bunch of reasons, but it is under active investigation.
There are lots of telescopes. The JWT will be great. It will not have the capabilities of the Hubble and it will not study the same things. Yes, you can get pretty pictures from any telescope but you can only study the early history of the universe with the Hubble. If there were a real replacement only two years out, that would be different, but naming another random telescope and saying "look, what's the big deal, we don't need _two_ telescopes" completely misses the point.
the gyros don't keep it in orbit, they keep it stabilized. All the gyros could stop and it wouldn't have an appreciable effect on the orbit decay. Booster rockets are used to refresh the orbit.
Who mods this crap "Insightful"??? How about "Outright Lie" or "Woefully Misinformed"?
6 5-2005Jan12.html
where did you get 80%?
Even the Bush whitehouse is downplaying the importance of the elections these days. Things really are "That Horrible", as you say:
The administration continues to say publicly that it expects a significant Sunni turnout, citing an International Republican Institute poll in early December showing 20 percent of Sunnis intend to vote and 35 percent intend "somewhat" to vote. But in light of the insurgents' growing attacks on election and government officials since that survey, U.S. officials fear last-minute attacks on polling stations, candidates and voters will produce a much smaller turnout among the minority group that once dominated Iraq. One unofficial estimate already predicts a vote as low as 10 percent in some areas.
Sunnis represent about 30% of the total population of Iraq, BTW.
source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
So they are. I was under the impression that the HST had maneuvering thrusters to adjust its orbit if not significantly in altitude, then at least laterally to avoid debris.
I know that the gyros only control orientation. On other satellites, the final gyro commands are usually sent to set things up for braking the craft so as to de-orbit the unit. It is that action to which I was referring, although standard practice seems to de-orbit at two good gyros, to allow for one failing during de-orbit procedures.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The boosters keep it in orbit. The gyros make sure it's pointing in the right direction for the boosters to move it that direction. Without gyros, the boosters could send it any which way.
One of the reasons there's not much interest on maintaining Hubble operational is because of the availability of land telescopes with similar precision nowadays.
The reason Hubble is in Space is because of lack of atmosphere distortion, so we have much more precise pictures.
But now we do have land telescopes which computer-controlled visual compensation which gives similar resolution at a fraction of the cost.
With advances in adaptive optics and computing, ground-based telescopes are now BETTER than the Hubble in many ways.
h ybuild/grbsspc .html
This site on the Large Binocular Telescope (recently threatened by wildfire!) is very interesting.
http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbto/w
Hubble Origins Probe, a rebuild of Hubble with modern technology on a expendible launch, will cost only $750M - $1000 according to the following report.
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/groups/ astro/Colin%20HOP_final_noBudget.pdf