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Instead of Revamping Hubble, Replace It
Neil Halelamien writes "Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build, less than the estimated cost of a service mission."
.. than the hubble. And scientists would get more bang for the buck to replace the hubble than to send up a robot which would have a likelihood of failure.
Except we lost the only shuttle that could get it up there.
This plan seems like a really good idea. Why hasn't anyone else... never mind.
It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build
Yes, and for a limited time this baby can be yours for ONLY $999,999,999.99!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Hey, Why build something you can repair when you could just buy a 10 pack of disposables. Sure, it might be *less* wasteful to build a new one from scratch, but it just seems such a sign of the times. Maybe they could get Gillette to sponsor the project.
meh
Of course we all want a new telescope. However, the Hubble scope is already in orbit. If it is not repaired, it will stop working. There's no guarantee that this new scope would be built any time soon. So, while we all would like a faster, better telescope, perhaps we should focus on the fact that we already have Hubble up there.
The $1 billion cost is not just parts, it's mostly the money to launch the shuttle, pay for mission support, etc.
Even if they can build a replacement for less then $1B, it would still be about one billion more than repairing it.
These guys might be good astronomers, but their math ain't that super.
Can we get this lens right the first time, too? :)
The coolest voice ever.
Really, think about it. If NASA sold Hubble off to the highest bidder, that buyer would have much more motivation and commitment to keep it around. Besides, why let NASA keep the monopoly on space programs? Let industry and private entrepenaurs have a go at it.
The US has much more pressing problems in this post 9/11 world. I'd rather my tax dollars go somewhere to things more immediate and important today.
...but there will be no refit.
Build a replacement and fix Hubble either around the same time or in the near future and have two working space telescopes for scientists to use.
Yes, I know.. money.
There is no spork.
that large floating space palace that was to be a mobile space workshop would be a good tool to use to redezvous with Hubble.
possibly being able to dock with it would allow for more thorough repair time. it just seems a little excessive to keep sending the shuttle up every few years to deal with small problems, why not grapple it, pull it in to the ISS and give it the full once over and set it loose.
not necessarily, a lens is a lens, they can i think change the CDD and com easily
May as well just fix/upgrade the one thats up there.
Well, if they want to shave another $10 million off that price tag, there's always SpaceX and the Falcon I.
Of course, they'll want to purchase the extended warranty with that one...
Oh damn, I really should have reworded that. The $1 billion includes the costs of not only construction, but of the launch as well. From the release:
Norman told the committee that it would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to launch HOP, which he stated would continue and even expand upon the flow of science and discovery that has made the original Hubble Space Telescope a "national treasure."
How about we send a robotic telescope instead? One with arms so that it could fix the Hubble, look at the stars and then hurl large rocks at the teeming citizens below...
1B isnt anything compared to the overall amount on repairing and operating the old hubble. Note that the advanced technologies today, are hundreds of times faster and more efficent. 1Billion over 5 years
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
The willingness of private investors to put up capital to service such markets shouldn't be underestimated. This is an exciting area of endeavour, just as is space transportation as witnessed by the recent investments in that field by adventurous angel investors.
Indeed, historically there has been a pattern of private financing of cutting edge telescopes without even a promise of any return at all. We can expect the private sector to step up to the plate if the government will stop pretending it is the source of innovation in technology and instead the source of funding for public-domain scientific research.
From a brief history of private endowment of telescopes:
In this stage, which lasted (roughly speaking) from the late 1800's to the middle of the 1900's, rich benefactors donated the money to establish observatories although they themselves were not practising astronomers. I gave some examples and anecdotal histories in class. For instance:
(i) James Lick made his fortune by funding "gold rush" hopefuls in San Francisco. He provided them a grubstake by buying up their land cheaply, and wound up owning most of what is now downtown San Francisco. He wanted to build an enormous pyramid in the city to commemorate himself, but was persuaded by the Regents of the University of California to build an observatory instead: Lick Observatory, just east of San Jose.
(ii) A man named Yerkes made his fortune building street car systems, and donated the money for the Yerkes 40-inch refractor, still the largest such telescope in the world. It is at Williams Bay, north of Chicago, and is operated by the University of Chicago. Yerkes was apparently quite an unscrupulous businessmen, by all accounts, and was never favoured with the respect which he hoped his endowment might buy for him.
(iii) David Dunlap made his fortune in Ontario silver mines, and was interested in astronomy. After his death, his widow donated a lot of money to the University of Toronto, who built the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill. When it opened in 1935, it was the second-largest telescope in the world.
(iv) The Carnegie Foundation, established by the Scotsman Andrew Carnegie, funds many philanthropic endeavours, including public libraries. It provided the money for the famous 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, which saw first light in 1950.
Amazingly, the days of such generosity are not completely gone: the new Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea are being provided by a Mr. Keck, the head of Standard Oil (I believe). The total cost is in the region of 200 million dollars; the telescopes are operated by the University of California.
Seastead this.
on the other hand, some of those students will get to work on building the new scope itself - which is an opportunity rarely available.
interesting dilemma for the future graduate students.
Astronomers have been fond of calling the Hubble as "the space telescope"...which is a mistake if you think about it. The word "the" implies that there will be only one space telescope at the present time.
If you think about it, it's always better to have a fleet of space telescopes, instead of just one.
I guess we were mentally stuck at the concept of "reusable" space missions (e.g., space shuttle orbiters) and made it difficult to design a mission "on the cheap" with disposable parts. There, we aimed our goals too high. Maybe we should have experimented more wiht cheaper disposable missions and then after that we should've started thinking about more advanced stuffs.
Nobody should pay to get a great pictures of discovery
shouldn't this be under science?
Would it not be much cheaper to make the images it sends back using Photo Shop? I mean, think of the savings!
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
So... when are we going to get the "Bill and Melinda Gates" Super Orbiting Scope ? I'm sure Bill can easily afford the $1Bil... ;)
Wouldn't the backside of the moon be the ultimate place?
On the backside of the moon there is a minimum of lightpollution with the advantages of (some) gravity.
You can have a bigger telescope that can be controlled via earth or directly.
It would be an excellent complement to a moonbase that will be very handy when building a ship for mars.
The moonbase would also be excellent to learn to create a selfsupporting environment for a marsbase.
But what do I know... Maybe the aliens already have reserved the backside of the moon...
It is time to say goodbye. been saying this for a while now. THere was a good article on spacedaily a while back too:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/hubble-04p.html
in fact they suggested even building 2. If Hubble keeps going a while longer, (it could go 2010 with luck) we would then have 2 scopes going!
Dont get me wrong, its been fantastic, but it is in essence 70's tech with upgrades bolted on. I think some of the bits are still original - they have been going a long long time, so when they blow thats it. There are a lot of things that can be done better too..
Tech has moved on - time to stop putting money into Hubble, great tho the old horse has been..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
...rather than the construction. "We built this ourselves, but got Gilette to raise 'er."
Sorry, it's very early AM for me, and my brain's still a bit... random.
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Why can't we sell it or donate it to another country as a gift if they are willing to take over upkeep?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I submitted the story, and because of some sloppy wording on my part a number of people now think that the $1 billion doesn't include the cost of launching the rocket. In actuality, it does include this cost already.
From their poster, here are the figures which go into the cost estimate (written as low/high estimate):
Spacecraft: $135M/$165M
Observatory ATLO: $80M/$100M
Deorbit Module: $5M/$10M
Optical Telescope Assembly: $150M/$210M
SI Mods: $20M/$30M
SI Integration: $5M/$10M
FGS: $30M/$55M
Fee: $64M/$87M
Contingency: $128M/$174M
Launch Vehicle: $130M/$150M
Total: $747M/$991M
Again, my apologies for wording my submission poorly.
It's very apparent that as religious nuts gain power in the United States, God Almighty as Creator will be the only thing taught to our children in public school. That means there's absolutely no need to study the stars and planets and outer space, since the formation of life on Earth (and the creation of this planet itself) was handled by some divine being.
We may as well disband NASA now and spend the one billion dollars on increasing our military might, because that's the only way the US is going to maintain its world power status in the near future. It sure won't be in the scientific field.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
The components using CCD's can be changed and have been numerous times, but it's still expensive to design and manufacture them. The separate costs of all those little developments could probably be more cheaply consolidated in one brand new telescope.
If it was their own money? Well, think about it. You can repair a dying telescope, or you can build a much better one. From this point, it seems better to just repair it. However, building a better one WOULD BE CHEAPER. So, if it was their money, I think they'd all arrive at the decision to replace it.
I don't get what you're complaining about the taxpayer stuff for. A REPAIR MISSION WOULD BE MORE EXPENSIVE.
- Super hi-rez!
- Candid actors!
- Exciting remote locations!
- New 'live' footage every day!
- All colours, races, ages!
- 'Steerable' option for our platinum members!
- No keywords to trigger the proxy filter at work (.nasa.gov domain)!
Find your higher calling today!"Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
But that would mean NASA having to admit they were wrong. Remember when they first made the shuttle, and it was supposed to be the end of all their problems, with missions going up every other week and making space travel being really cheap. I think for some reason that if they would have kept with the old apollo or saturn rockets, that they would have done much more important stuff in space instead of worrying about doing complete overhauls after every trip on something that is supposed to be "reusable". It's like saying that you're car is reusable, but every night, when you're done with it, we'll swap out the engine for a new one, and replace the entire outer body.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Let's think about this logically for a second. Building a new version of the hubble will give us a better telescope, create extra jobs for 65 months AND be less expensive than the mission to repair our existing telescope. Now, you say it's a bad thing that this is being considered?
I understand and agree that americans tend to throw out more than they should, especially in the realm of automobiles, but you've picked the wrong example to illustrate that.
I though the whole point about repairing the Hubble is so we'd have something until the next-generation telescopes were launched. I wonder if 65 months will be fast enough since it'll probably take at least another year to get approved even if it's fast-tracked (assuming NASA has a fast-track, at least the less slow track).
Personally, I'm not too eager to launch new telescopes until we can launch a group of interferometer telescopes.
So... when are we going to get the "Bill and Melinda Gates" Super Orbiting Scope ? I'm sure Bill can easily afford the $1Bil... ;)
Sorry, they're busy fighting AIDS in Africa ;).
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Why stop with one Hubble; create a fleet of Hubbles (Imagine a Beowolf cluster of Hubbles )
The orbits could be set so that we can synchonize the photos from two Hubbles at once, from the opposite sides of the planet for a much better view.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I think more money should be spent on democratizing Iran and Iraq and bringing the people there good American freedom than on useless junk like this Hubbie.
65 months though, I don't have a problem with doing both.
Wasn't this the original plan before people let their knee-jerk reactions get the best of them? This plan is obviously better than the one the save Hubble. There is no question Hubble is begining to show its age. Why risk 1.5 billion on a "rescue" mission, when there is no guarantee that some other aging system won't malfunction in another 6 months anyway? Would we be willing to spend another 1.5 billion fixing that? No, the answer is clear: Build a new Space telescope using newer, cheaper, smaller, more powerful technology. To me, it is like the Social Security isuue. It's obvious the current system is broke and won't be able to sustain itself. Lets scrap it and come up with something better that will be more cost efficient with better results. Why people come up with these knee-jerk reactions defending a broken system is beyond me. Just afraid of change I guess.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Uhm... http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /webb_ngst_030108.html
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
...that the scientists get the lense size right on their first try this time around. Don't want to be sending up another replacement, to replace the replacement for the original replacement... and yes, that sentence does make sense when you think about it ;-]
If Bill finances Hubble II, he'll insist that it run Windows XP. Just imagine a Hubble with viruses. And I don't even want to think about spyware...
Two in Earth orbit to provide immediate redundancy and a longer baseline for simultaneous observations (triangulation), then put one in an orbit perpendicular (or nearly so) to the ecliptic (with a planetary slingshot, might even have to send it around Jupiter to get enough delta-vee). This will give #3 a much longer baseline, a unique viewpoint and clearer seeing (less solar system junk between it and targets).
Make them a bit more redundant, too, multiple independently steered comms links, multiple cross-linked power sources, redundant navigation gear, that kind of thing. Repair will not be an option for #3, and even for #1 and #2 bumping up the cost by $200M is a great investment if it doubles the useful life of each 'scope.
I've often wondered about the effect of barrel-bottom-scraping on a lot of these missions. Cassini cost $3G, but what else could they have done given $4G? Added another half-dozen Huygens-sized landers? One for a second site/go at Titan, one each for Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Encelades, Mimas? Added more propellant for a longer mission, more instruments for a more informative mission?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why would it take so long to build a replacement? Would the majority of the time be spent on programming? Could we not save a little time by sending it up there with minimal programing and, basically, the ability for us to upgrade it's firmware? I just don't understand why the building should take THAT long.
I'm not saying making a replacement for Hubble instead of saving it wouldn't be a good thing. I just think the costs compared shoudl be apples to apples, not apples to half an apple. ;)
It's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo.
People seem to love modding me down for pointing out their stupidity and arrogance...
This would give you a "lens" much bigger and clearer than the current one, more suitable for stretching the muscles of the newer generation of imaging devices.
It would also be sensible to spend an extra kg or 2 to put in a turret with several of each kind of imager that they want to use mounted on it. That way, if one breaks or degrades it's not such a showstopper. Something as grossly mechanical as a turret does contain moving parts, but isn't anywhere near as delicate as the instrumentation it carries. Providing it with several independent drives and positioning systems would be relatively trivial.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If one is making an iso-fruitopic comparison one also needs to remember that the costs of a repair mission are probably pretty accurate (they've done a few already) while the costs of building a new scope and launching it are wild-ass guesses.
...but even so, adding launch costs of $150M doesn't upset the applecart.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
1) Submit a story with a mistake.
2) ???
3) Fix the mistake in comments.
4) Karma!!!
Cave homes have a long history and are still being built. They have good temperature regulation, are quiet, and use up less arable land than a conventional house.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You don't get 12t up to a 750km orbit with a bottle rocket.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A new Hubble with a primary mirror 2.4 meters in diameter will have the exact same angular resolution as the old Hubble with a primary mirror 2.4 meters in diameter.
EUR7700 per kg? Or should we use Francs? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What's the point in even replacing it, anyways? yea, that thing is old, but do we really need to go through the trouble of taking Hubble out and replacing it? Hubble's been doing fine so far, and we will have to go through the trouble of either loading it up in the shuttle with the Astronauts and bringing it back or crashing it in the Atlantic. Both options are time consuming, and if we crash it, we wont be able to salvage the parts. so, take the time to do that and add it to the time it takes to build the new telescope and the time to launch it and everything and we vould have just fixed Hubble 5 times over.
Sheesh, it took em this long to realize that? Consumers have known for years that if you just wait a bit the technology vastly increases while the price decreases. When we bought our Pentium 1 years back, it cost ~3-4 thousand dollars. When we bought our Pentium 4, it cost about 1 thousand dollars. Now do I even NEED to state the ammount better a P4 is than a P1? On top of that, there is no real way of upgrading a P1 to the speeds of a P4 short of completely replacing everything and just keeping the case.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Very bad for astronomers. Not to mention having to install MS Media Player XVIII to get the DRM to view the images.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I wondered whether the Bush administration's willingness to junk Hubble was a symptom of the same American retreat from Science as th pressure to give "Scientific Cretionism" equal support and prestige in America's schools.
That retreat from knowledge is a crying shame.
I had a buddy who always referred to it as "Scientific Cretinism -- I'm sorry Creationism".
As I have already written in my article, the White House has no intention to pay for a fourth servicing mission, and I doubt it will pay for a new telescope. They seem to prefer to spend $80 billion for Iraq. Very simply, science isn't in the roadmap of Washington anymore. However, if anybody is willing to advocate a servicing mission, I can help.
Since when is a new Hubble telescope an IT-related topic? Am I alone in asking, "WTF??"
More along the lines of churning money through Bill's pharma companies while at the same time using the US Trade people to slap down competitors who would have had the medication there years ago otherwise.
And on top of this, the Africans are slowly discovering that the simplest, cheapest and most effective AIDS "drug" is monogamy.
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http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/book/chpttwelve.pdf
To be honest, I do not entirely understand the great fuss over the fate of the Hubble telescope. It has had a long and immensely successful career probing the reaches of the universe, but it is getting old.
I guess many people think that once the Hubble is gone, there will be nothing to replace it. But the Next Generation James Webb telescope has been in development for years, and is currently scheduled for deployment in 2011. With this in mind, decomissioning the Hubble doesn't seem such a tragedy.
Not necessarily. The corrective optics in Hubble (because the mirror was ground wrong) reduce the effective resolution.
i say we blow it up like they do with the casinos... f-in a.
You only need adaptive optics when you're trying to image through our turbulent atmosphere. Images from space are diffraction-limited -- the only way to get higher resolution is to build a bigger telescope.
Here are his instructions to Abram, who was renamed Abraham: "Look attentively, I pray thee, towards the heavens, and count the stars, if thou art able to count them". (-;
On a more serious note, yes, the rise of the Religious Right presents a steadily increasing problem. Did you know that "religious nuts" are responsible for the separation-of-church-and-state provisions in both the US and Australian Constitutions? A chap by the name of Alonzo T Jones dunnit. The Powers That Were wanted to enact blue laws, so Mr Jones and crew first directed them to a literal reading of Exodus 20, and then when the politicians switched to walling off Saturdays instead of Sundays, convinced them to - if there is such a word - deshrine religious holidays in the law: make sure that none were enforced, all were permitted.
From your tone, you would like to outlaw what you see as religion, which would in reality be outlawing every religion but one: Atheism. Let's put this another way: you would make Atheism the State Religion as the Religious Right would make a concensus "Christianity" the State Religion.
Not only is Atheism a social disaster (France tried it, along with China and the USSR, North Korea and numerous others; go read the dismal record if you want to get depressed), but it's actually being done by stealth all across Western society as we type, using the exact same Constitutional provision intended to prevent it. The Religious Right is both a reaction to this and an excuse for it. If they get their way, we'll be living in a Puritan state, re-living the Dark Ages. If they don't, we'll be reliving Lenin's purges. The end of both their actions or yours will be a disaster, either way.
What we really need is to properly enforce the Constitution. To do this, simply formally recognise Atheism as a religion and enforce the existing no-religious-preferences rules rigorously. That would both starve the Religious Right of fuel by removing an excuse to react, and begin to remove the existing shackles from science. Scientists today are forced to ensure that their work fits within Materialist (Atheist) dogma, or face systematic attack from powerful religious forces. Without that handicap, they'd be free to explore a lot more options.
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if they build a new one, why not sell the old one to someone else and let them worry about maintaining it.
otherwise its only going to burn up in the atmosphere, this way you could make money on it too
reducing government spending. I think Hubble should not be repaired and not be replaced. Unpopular opinion on here, I know.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
Given that 44% of the US population do not accept evolution, and that persecution is their lot if they enter most scientific fields, is it any wonder that interest in science is flagging? The US is suffering the same fate as France after the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and similar religious persecutions. France drove out their best and brightest and fell into a scientific and industrial malaise as a result, now the USA (most Western countries too) is beginning to do the same.
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...the longer it will be until Hubble is replaced. And one day, it will fail, so the obvious answer is to shut up and start building the sucker.
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It's a great idea, but $1 billion? They'll go over budget.
I post all kinds of incendiary stuff, even in support of unpopular-on-SlashDot ideas like creationism and my karma's been slammed against the stops since the day they put the cap on. There's no point in being careful with your posts.
Considers FleaPlus's UID (this is actually my third ID, I have no idea what happened to the first two). Hmm. "In our day, don'ch'a remember, we had real Karma, not this namby-pamby limited-to-fifty stuff. You could open 'er up and have karma races!" (-:
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1) Send shuttle on risky repair mission. Estimated cost- 1.7 to 2.4 Billion dollars and potentially up to seven lives.
2) Develop and build complicated robot gizmotron that might or might not be able to do the job. Estimated cost- 1.6 Billion
3) The hell with it, just build a new one. Use the same basic design updated with latest technology and these replacement parts we developed for the old one and shoot it up on an expendable booster. Estimated cost under a billion.
Hmmm..... I like option 3!
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/05/2 210251
Believing that God exists is a religion. If your God is all fuzzy and distant like Antony Flew's, it's called Deism but it's still religion. Believing that God does not exist is religion. Believing that God's existence is unprovable one way or another is religion.
Religion as a principle has nothing to do with monks, fasting, cathedrals, stained-glass windows or wearing saffron robes. These are all what you might call implementation details. Some forms of religion manifest obviously, some do not.
Clear?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The way this issue should be addressed in (again dare I say) scientific and economic terms would be based on the value of the scientific research Hubble can perform versus the lost opportunity costs from the interval when there would be no such telescope available.
Not the reality, but a deliberate exaggeration to clarify the issue: Imagine that we needed a space telescope to detect asteroids that were liable to strike the earth. In that case, we would absolutely need to keep the Hubble in service until a replacement telescope could be prepared--and better to have several in orbit all the time.
Unfortunately, the current reality is that this is mostly a political issue, and the deeper danger is that scientific research is not important to the religious fanatics in charge, since they already know all the answers. It's not a matter of spending $1 billion on Hubble or committing $0.5 billion for a better replacement--it's that they would prefer to spend zilch on science and $200 billion on getting rid of Saddam. (If Saddam was worth $200 billion, it certainly makes one shudder to imagine the costs for getting rid of the other tyrants, since Saddam was one of the weakest and least important ones.)
Actually, this is tightly linked to politics surrounding the Space Shuttle. I heard this story from the same fellow who wrote most of Reagan's Star Wars speech (though he specifically disavowed the specific bit about Star Wars). He was chancellor of the UT system at that time. The Space Shuttle part was actually related to Nixon, however. As Apollo was winding down, NASA went to Nixon with a very ambitious proposal for a much more flexible kind of Space Shuttle system, but Nixon said it was *way* too expensive. The current version was actually the third or fourth reduced proposal. In the long term, the compromise was bad pretty much every way you slice it. America's manned space program is nearly dead, and 13 astronauts and one teacher are very dead.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
...of having a meaningless life if you already have one so confusing and painful that you can't even think. (-:
There is some merit, however, in the breeding licence. Certainly, you've offered a powerful and immediate motivation to pass.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
...is to have the Army build and launch Hubble II.
Bill it as a spysat (heck, you could even add some real spysat features to it that operated independently and up the mass from 11.5t to 12t).
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Not really, remember that the new scope would mostly be just another hubble, built off the same design plans, with the 'additional work' being the work previously planned for the service mission, but done on the ground.
I don't read AC A human right
NASA IS REPLACING HUBBLE ALREADY... and in the interrum Hubble WORKS... and works WELL!!
s are still underway for the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, which would be launched in 2011."
The new Space Telescope is called "The James Webb Space Telescope." It is (via specs) better than Hubble.
From hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/future/
"Plan
If you guys, and that O'Keefe bozo (formerly) at NASA have their way, a WORKING, and SCIENTIFICALLY SIGNIFICANT telescope will be left to die even while it's STILL producing amazing results!!
And in space, NOTHING is a done deal. Sure we can do better than Hubble. But until said better telescope is in orbit AND working, we need to leave Hubble in place. Otherwise we have a multi-year downtime between two missions... and a potentially LONGER downtime if Webb (et al) fails.
I submitted similar input to NASA during their request for comments about the Hubble-Webb transition.
Please, don't get cocky about this. Sure, we have some high profile successes of late (Mars Rovers, Cassini/Huygens), but before that, NASA's better-faster-cheaper lost two Mars mission (one via a metric/English conversion error), and a Shuttle. Plus ESA's Huygens had one xmitter failure, losing directional data.
-Pie
Beautiful stars better see.
That's astronomer NOT astrologer. And if you work for nasa part of your taxes goes to paying for nasa projects just like every other american.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
I was going to post something similar to this.
I'll add that the James Webb Telescope will work at longer wavelengths than Hubble, and will not duplicate Hubble's UV capability. In that sense, I would support the proposed Hubble "copy" that would fly the to-be-orphaned new Hubble Instruments, especially as seeing as how there's no ultraviolet spectroscopic capability in the near term.
I suspect this idea is dead in the water given where James Webb Space Telescope is at the moment. It is viewed by Washington and most of the astronomical community as Hubble's replacement, and attempts to propose new ultraviolet telescopes to advance Hubble's current science have not fared well.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Sounds like Grandpa's old axe. I still have it. Well, Dad had to replace the handle in '68. And the head wore out in '92, so had to replace that too. But it's still Grandpa's axe. And oh, don't forget, a lot of the glitches in the original were due to time constraints.
Is it a good idea to even HAVE a deadline for this kind of project?
You only need adaptive optics when you're trying to image through our turbulent atmosphere. Images from space are diffraction-limited -- the only way to get higher resolution is to build a bigger telescope.
The techniques of adaptive optics are used in space to compensate for mechanical stresses of space travel, temperature variations, manufacturing flaws, etc. They are used on the new Spitzer Space (infrared) Telescope.
Basically, if you want a bigger telescope, then adaptive optics (or at least something similar) is the way to do it.
These comments do express the opinions of my employers, and, personally, I think they're complete rubbish.
Not very much at all...which is why they were installed in the first place. They did decrease the throughput, which is why all the new instruments have been designed with optics to compensate for Hubble's flawed primary.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
One of the suggestions for fixing the hubble's gyros was to include gyros in an experiment package. This got me to thinking:
Why are the gyros not a plugin item?
Why is the plugin not to essentially the same standard as the experiments.
While the primary optical path (including covers) and any docking connections and the like are a one-of and optimally should be special-purpose structures, virtually all the rest of the telescope's infrastructure - gyros, computers, batteries, etc. - could be built into pluggable modules. (Even attitude / station-keeping thruster assemblies and their tankage could be puuggable.)
Perhaps the replacment could be designed that way?
Making things pluggable would reduce the on-station time for service missions - whether repair, upgrade, experiment-change, or replace-consumables. It would also simplify building unmanned robotic service vehicles for the telescope, and reduce the likelyhood failure in robotic service missions.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But...
This makes so much sense! We know the Hubble has been a extraordinary success. The basic architecture is sound. The 'problem' it attacked (basically, getting above the atmosphere) is obviously real.
So, refactor! Take the overall design, study it closely, decide *both* what worked well and should be kept, and what needs improvement, and make a incremental but substantial re-design.
This works in our field (software), it will work for space-based instruments as well.
Do the simple thing!
Sigh! Doing the simple thing just ain't sexy. Oh, well...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Nice. Got what you meant immediately. Hope I get a chance to use in conversation sometime soon. If it's original to you, take a bow. :)
Wow, obviously you're not a photographer (or at least not a very professional one.) I would never compare a $100 sigma lens to some $1,500+ Canon L glass. I'm not saying the Hubble is cheap and crappy, but why spend $2 billion upgrading the hubble when they can just build a new one for half that?
I'm sorry, no one is going to entire a market to build _one_ telescope; and no governmental agency is going to "give" large grants to scientits so that they have the buying power to do this sort of thing. Certainly a _few_ rich guys did some really neat things, but this is *very tiny* amount of funding compared to actual needs.
With the hubble you have _old_ technology that can clearly be replaced with newer technology. Social security is more like a form of government than a technology, and I've yet to see anything better.
The biggest problem with social security is people think of it in terms of money; they shouldn't. Social Security is a generational transfer, from the workers to the retirees (and to children without parents). For it to work, with less workers, we need to improve efficiency of the workers, that means better education. Also, with healthcare getting better and lifespans getting longer, there is no reason why the retirmenet age should'nt be adjusted to that the percentage of people _covered_ by social security as compared to workers remains constant.
One thing I didn't entirely follow from the articles, though I didn't read them all, is this going to be placed in high enough an orbit that it won't decay enough to hit the atmosphere before its useful lifetime is up. I'd imagine that if that were the case it would preclude servicing with a shuttle mission if it were to have a major failure early in its life, not that thats ever happened :)
Would hope that they are planning to either put it in a high enough orbit it will last for 10-15 years or that they put a module in to boost its own orbit, though that would probably add to the cost and complexity of building it.
To me the deorbit module is a lot less important than a module to boost the orbit. All the hand wringing over Hubble reentering of its own accord is misplaced in my opinion. Chances are not many big pieces are going to survive reentry, the earth is still a relatively empty place and its not much more risk than a mid size meteor.
@de_machina
for less than the price of a servicing mission sounds smart. Sorry for being cynical, but it sounds so smart that I doubt it will never happen.
No data, no cry
Whatever happened to the Weber telecope that was supposed to replace Hubble? Wasn't it part of the 5 great telescopes project.
It's lens, not lense. And it's not a lens, it's a mirror. And it wasn't the wrong size, it was figured with a slight spherical abberation. And it wasn't the designers or engineers that got it wrong, it was the company that made the mirror for them; a backup made by Kodak was actually made per spec and has no such problem. And besides, they fixed that years ago, 100% fixed. And the image processing techniques that they were forced to develop due to the mirror problem are still being used on both space and ground based telescope imagery.
...attempts to propose new ultraviolet telescopes to advance Hubble's current science have not fared well.
And so sadly, we are about to enter a long period where we will no longer be able to explore the detailed composition of any predominantly non-molecular astronomical object that's not at moderate redshift.
The Hubble has no boosters, so there's no provision for controlled deorbit. It has only reaction wheels for orientation. If no visit is paid to at least strap on a de-orbit pack, the Hubble will reenter in an uncontrolled fashion.
The US is a signatory on a treaty which prohibits us from allowing dangerous space junk from entering in an uncontrolled fashion over populated areas. Therefore we have to visit the Hubble at least to deorbit it.
If we're going there anyway, why not put on the de-orbit pack AND new batteries, instruments, gyros, etc?
you are so funny...
But that funding will have to be cut or will be worthless due to the massive increase in inflation that's around the corner since it's what we like to call "Deficit Spending" or "printing money to fund projects rather than increasing productivity".
/rant
Sure, you can spout all this stuff out but it's no different than a hillbilly with a Big Screen TV. It's fun to act rich but sooner or later you have to pay for it.
That said, I am for Tax Cuts but the money we've spent in IRAQ and on the "War" on "Fear" to the alarming benefit of Private Military Companies (PMC's) (wiki) would be better spent in my eyes on the furthURing of the knowledge of humanity. Alas, I'm sure they have plans into the future for such things, I just wish we could have it today. And I wish Bush and Co. could convince me that we're doing the right thing, rather than reiterating the same buzzwords (freedom, liberty, terror, fear, Iraqi "people", evil, etc.)
Cool! Amazing Toys.
And also to Atheism, in a big way. If you are an Atheist, it logically follows either that you are responsible for everything (ie, helplessly overloaded with responsibility) because you are the highest authority around or nothing (irresponsibility) because nobody is the highest authority around. Guess which way people turn if left to themselves?
Social communism is an attempt to provide a system which is equitable built out of people who are inherently selfish. This is like making bricks out of sand. You have to glaze (torture) the sand to get it to hang together at all, you still lose lots, and you still have to settle for building low ceilings because your bricks are not very strong.
Taking Christianity as antitypical of Atheism (hypothetically, any form of Deism is "opposite" to Atheism), one immediately stumbles across the Golden Rule as the key to and core of everything. Any society built on the Golden Rule is going to work much better than one built on busybodies or selfishness. And they do.
It used to be that I puzzled over how people can take that and twist it into the strictly hierarchical and constantly clashing institutions which call themselves Christian, but no longer.
People who do that are simply expressing the latent Atheism exemplified in the fall. They know better than God how to organise things, with inevitable results. The Christianity winds up being more or less just a label.
"Pie in the sky when you die" doesn't work. That's only deferred gratification, and not noticeably more meritorious than immediate gratification. The only motivation which lasts and is effective is agape, a word which in Koine Greek has a slightly different meaning to modern Greek. And Atheism has no rationale for agape. In essence it makes us responsible for ourselves and one another in a non-invasive fashion.
The central planning to which you refer is a natural abdication of responsibility which would be healthy if it was a planned abdication to a perfect ruler. I guess you could call the prole's-eye-view of it the "ying" or surrendering side of Atheism.
Those picking up the responsibility are the "yang" or conquering side of Atheism, which would work just fine if they were altruistic but people generally don't even start that way, let alone remain it.
Sooner or later the leaders start regarding themselves as in some way more important than the led, power auto-centralises even more, and always there is the cumbersome feedback lag and massive data loss between the ploughman and the president to contend with.
Organisations like the Papacy are simply central planning for the large political and financial organisation it sits atop. The organisation directs power to and through itself, not to any supernatural deity.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Plenty of UV expertise at Wisconsin, where I almost went for grad school. I was a FUSE post-doc for a few years, and have written more than one paper on ultraviolet spectroscopy. Lots of transitions there that provide important diagnostics. A good friend of mine is at Boulder with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) group (COS is one of the instruments that was slated to go onto Hubble, before). They'll get by, but we're definitely losing unique scientific capability.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I'm inclined to think that a new Hubble, without the flawed mirror, which should give the new one a field of view much larger than the error corrected range of the existing Hubble has, is a worthwhile project. I've seen figures of 17 times the image area, and that is not something to sneeze at. I'm not a huge expert in optical matters, but the glasses put on Hubble to fix it cannot do anything but restrict its field of view rather seriously.
With new imaging devices that are both larger, and potentially more sensitive by a factor of 20 or so, one figure I saw earlier tonight, the new one could very well break even more new ground in scientific research.
And I'd like to also remind those that think the James Webb scope to go up in about 5-6 years, as a Hubble replacement, is a highly false assumption as its sensors aren't really designed to cover visible light wavelengths. Each has its job, and the Webb cannot do what the Hubble is doing, and vice-versa. Both will make great contributions to our scientific knowledge.
One thing I'd like to see changed in the new Hubble is the gyroscopes. It seems to me that an optical gyro would not only be longer lasting than the mechanical units used now, but potentially far more accurate. Is there a technical problem with them that I am not aware of that makes the mechanical gyro the only useable method?
The reaction wheels that steer the existing Hubble seem to have been pretty dependable, so that weight at launch time is certainly justifiable and of course, unlike steering rockets, do not leave potentially damaging particulate matter in the orbital vicinity. They are also run from a replenishable power supply, the solar wings.
I'd also question the "from day one" approach to de-orbiting it by the planned attachment of the rocket motor designed to drop it in the pacific at the end of its life. Mechanical things in a vacuum tend to freeze up and not work after a while, and if the new one gives us a projected lifetime of 15 to 20 years, who is going to run up and fix it when it doesn't fire as planned? Good question that...
Its also a good question as to how do we replace the batteries which it will probably need at least 2, maybe 3 sets of them in its projected service life?
This seems like an ideal time to design in an easily changed by robotics cartridge carrier for the batteries, something a very simple minded robotic mission could do by designing into the side of the scope, the robots docking hooks, which when all are engaged, would automaticly position the rest of the robot to do the rest of the job autonomously.
I hope they do it, and I hope I live to see its results. Its my tax money, and I vote to do it, asap since I'm already 70.
--
Cheers, Gene
How do you explain away the many successful scientists who are both out-and-out Creationists and dare to say so despite the risk of being branded heretic and burned at the academic stake for it? We're not talking "soft sciences" here, either. I used to live within a stone's throw of an amply qualified nuclear physicist who was and is a Creationist. I've spoken with well-qualified local Geologists and Biologists and Mathematicians and others who are also Creationists. They're not as rare as you seem to presume.
Go and get the transcripts of those meetings and read them. All of those present are well qualified scientists and had a philosophical and academic commitment to evolution - this is not a scones-and-tea social chat after church - and still kept bouncing off the impossibility of what they supported. And since those meetings, the figures have gotten steadily worse as we learn more about how things work.
Dear old Charlie D was only able to entertain his ideas of evolution because he thought of cells as being little homogeneous blobs of jelly. Read his books. If he knew as much about cells as we do today, he would never have proposed evolution. Instead, he would be joining Antony Flew for services in the Church of the Unknowable Designer.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm sure you've heard of Stanley Miller of Urey and Miller lightning-in-a-jar fame? Now go and follow the rest of his career. He's spent since 1953 (ie over fifty years of his life) trying to make more complex organic molecules in plausible (or even implausible) environments, and came up empty. Nor was he able to do anything about racemisation, which is of course natural, and fatal to any molecules-to-man programme.
Miller also went looking for evidence of the reducing atmosphere his original experiment required, and came up empty there too. You might also want to consider the earlier work of Walther Löb, Oskar Baudisch and Edward Bailey, and DE Hull's followup to Miller which ended with: Every dictionary I can find defines it as positive disbelief in the existence of any deity. That's a religious position.
No robes, chanting or stained glass are required when forming a religion, although there is actually a Church of Humanism. Yes, really! I don't know whether they have a big mirror across the front, or what the story is, but it exists.No? Then what's a peer-reviewed journal for?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and only if they stay on and intact. They don't cover you for kissing, blowjobs and the like. And even in perfect conditions, they don't always work.
Better a condom than completely bare sex, but thinking of a condom as a magic bullet against AIDS is kind of suicidal. Monogamy is at least an order of magnitude more effective.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The only problem that Social Security has is that it is owed a lot of money by the US government, and the US is unable to pay it back. In a perfect world this would be the problem of the US government, not the Social Security system. In our current world...
What is happening is that for decades more is being paid into Social Security than is being paid out, and that excess is being used to buy government bonds. If the government paid back those bonds like they would any other investor, Social Security as it now stands would be solvent through 2070, even under fairly pessimistic projections.
The problem is that our government doesn't want (and may be unable) to pay back those bonds. Therefore Bush's plan is to find a way to "revamp" Social Security in such a way that the US Govt can quietly default on that obligation (very quietly, the bonds would just grow indefinitely and be "reinvested" in the government indefinitely). Of course this can only happen if a lot of people get a lot less than they are currently projected to get, so the game comes down to find a way to play the shell game in such a way that the victims either don't figure it out, or else are people this administration dislikes anyways.
The solution to Social Security seems to be taking the first road. With cries of "crisis" to help convince people to accept some extra pain. The solution that is being floated to the AMT problem is taking the latter - they would eliminate AMT and them eliminate deductions that affect blue states more than red ones.
Of course the problem is that, even if you take an eraser to the part of the US debt that is owed to the Social Security system, our debt levels are still untenable, and our other creditors are likely to insist on payment some day. If enough do so at once, we run out of money.
Given our current economics, I'm betting that this happens within 20 years, and probably within 10. Within 5 is possible, but highly unlikely unless Bush screws up more than I think he realistically can.
TalkOrigins isn't fond of publishing effective rebuttals to their own material, especially not until they have a reasonable-sounding answer to publish alongside it. This is why the answers on their site all look so final, complete, authoritative and above all, comforting. However, several such rebuttals live on TrueOrigin, and occasionally CreationSafaris publishes one.
Also, GRISDA publishes evolution-oriented news essentially without comment, a constant stream of which goes unanswered by Talk.Because it would be untrue. Science as a principle is impatial WRT questions of diety, supernatural causes are generally treated as error factors, much the same as any other engineering problem. Western science as a collective institution is on the other hand extremely hostile to anything smacking of God or even design and regularly takes an unscientific stand against the whole concept, everywhare from the lab to Congress.
Take for example these clowns, whose broken HTML seems to have been a little fixed since I told them about it. But not much. The password is 7seven7:Nice and neutral, hey? Despite this, they absolutely refuse to have me (or anyone else seriously supporting Creation) speak at one of their lectures, for free or otherwise, under any circumstances. And won't say why. The only item on their speaking agenda which mentions creationism is entitled Built on Sand: The Collapsing Creationist Tower and their news items are 100% oriented toward how bad it is that ID or Creation should get any kind of foot in an academic door.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
An administrator overseeing the grants for said clowns' site wants them to rename it because it's misleading. (-:
Have a look at the reviewer's comment in the password-protected docs. That is, if you don't fear being done under the DMCA for typing in "7seven7". Still, I suppose it's better than "password". Or follow the direct link, which - not containing any JavScript - doesn't ask you for a password.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
One thing I didn't entirely follow from the articles, though I didn't read them all, is this going to be placed in high enough an orbit that it won't decay enough to hit the atmosphere before its useful lifetime is up.
The proposed telescope would be at 750km, whereas the original Hubble is at 600km. For comparison, the ISS ranges between 340km and 400km. The Space Shuttle can only go as high as 643km, and wouldn't be able to service the proposed probe.
Nonetheless, AO can't push things beyond diffraction limits. If you want to improve your resolution past diffraction, you're going to have to increase the size of the scope.
Also, do you have a reference for your claim that Spitzer uses AO? I couldn't find a single mention of that fact, anywhere. In fact, I can't find a mention of *any* spaceborne imaging system that uses AO.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
That's the price of another stealth bomber. What are we going to do without another stealth bomber???? Christ, we'll lose the war on terror! We can't lose the war on terror! Our enemies will think we're weak if spend money on anything but weapons!!!
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
- priests: Richard Dawkins and his ilk
- prayer: I've personally heard a number of Atheists pray to a "Holy Shit!"
- creation mythology: "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded, eventually forming hydrogen, stars, planets, slime, monkeys and philosophers."
- armageddon mythology: "In the end of time, we're all gunna freeze in the dark." Fimbulwinter, anyone?
- afterlife: "There is definitely no afterlife. WYSIWYG."
Atheism is defined in English dictionaries as (and the French word, athée, is essentially the same):- Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
- The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
- Godlessness; immorality.
That last is kind of derived from the revolution mentioned above, and it's not pertinent to this part of our discussion anyway. The first two are definite statements of belief. Atheism is defined entirely by religious statements, therefore Atheism is a religion.This applies whether you personally want to be considered as "religious" or not.
Perhaps you have religion confused with sacerdotalism, which is where all of the priests, ornamentation and other hocus pocus (itself a corruption of hoc est curpos meum, the Catholic forgiveness formula in Latin) comes from. If this is the case, then you can proudly state with a clear conscience that "I am not sacerdotal!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...went to Kuro5hin, dunno if he's still there. Glad to see it's still alive, though.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not at all. You can show me your two arms, I or a medic I trust can examine you and verify the presence or absence of a third. You cannot show me a singularity exploding to form a universe, nor hydrogen condensing from that explosion, nor abiogenesis proceeding unaided or nor proto-monkeys turning into men. Or indeed anything of the sort.Would that be natural selection, or random mutation at work? Please, clue us in on this one, since artificially selected Mendellian genetics is all that's in evidence to us. Mendellian genetics does not produce new species, or new information of any kind it only split (and mixes, if you bend the definition of "species" a little) existing species. Think of a kaliedoscope. It doesn't put any more shiny things into the 'scope, it only shuffles the ones that are already there. And that's not evolution.To cut a long story short: no, it doesn't work. Genetics works, which is fine and cool and fantastic since God required each wee beastie to reproduce "after his kind". Evolution is a completely different matter. I really don't know where to start, there's so much missing here. Hmmm. How about with a careful definition of evolution? And see if you can avoid these fallacies, too. It will save a lot of time and anguish.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Our dear friend Mr. Gates can fund his own mission to install a Microsoft kernal as part of the robo-drive-through-Hubble-repair-mission.
Evolution is a faith-based position, or to be pedantic it is a position necessary to a particular statement of faith, to wit, Materialism. Materialists needed a Creation narrative of their own, and they chose a very long one.
To have 44% of your population disbelieve a particular faith is not amazing.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
this is a damn smart idea! ... cool! just do it!
it's cheaper to build a new one, which won't
be "short-sighted", into which instruments intended
for the "old" hubble, can be mounted AND keep
giving use "human-eye" light frquenzy pictures of
the limitless universe
It might never land.
More fool you for suggesting a thought experiment built out of unobtainum. (-:
A real Möbius strip might land on edge.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you guys, and that O'Keefe bozo (formerly) at NASA have their way, a WORKING, and SCIENTIFICALLY SIGNIFICANT telescope will be left to die even while it's STILL producing amazing results!!
Fine, you want it up, YOU pay for it. Organize a group of astronomers and research agencies and let them foot the bill for repairing Hubble. Maybe you can form a company to foot the bill using investment capital and then sell time on the Hubble.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
You can't find any because they don't exist, the poster you quoted is just making shit up.
No spacecraft uses AO because there is no need. Compensation of thermal effects is done by proper mechanical engineering design, not in the optics.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Spacecraft: $135M/$165M
Observatory ATLO: $80M/$100M
Deorbit Module: $5M/$10M
Optical Telescope Assembly: $150M/$210M
SI Mods: $20M/$30M
SI Integration: $5M/$10M
FGS: $30M/$55M
Fee: $64M/$87M
Contingency: $128M/$174M
Launch Vehicle: $130M/$150M
Total: $747M/$991M
Hey, you forgot:
finding a distant galaxy that looks like goatse...... priceless.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Sadly it's more like 0km.
Some of the best, most compact code for certain situations can be written by a process known as genetic algorithms, in which said code is refactored into a DNA-like form and allowed to breed based on its success at the required task.
The example I was told about involved distinguishing between a high-frequency and a low-frequency signal. Took a couple of thousand generations to get it working completely consistently, but once it did it was able to achieve the result in a mere 30-odd logic gates. No human programmer would be able to achieve that result, and no-one who's studied said result can figure out how the hell it works in anything other than the most vague terms.
44%???? Where do you get that? 4.4, maybe even 14%, I will believe. But Americans are not that foolish or stupid. I am not saying that evolution is the answer (it is a theorey, but it has a lot backing it), but there is no more proof of creationism, than any of the other religious ideas (do you really think that some god threw up the world? and yet it has just as much proof; None) .
As to the suffering, I think of Gallileo, Corpernicus, and Kepler vs. the christian church. And that was with LOADS of proof that the solar system was helicentric. Worse that was over a number of centuries.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The Space Shuttle can only go as high as 643km, and wouldn't be able to service the proposed probe."
The obvious downside being if it fails at launch or early in its life the whole thing is lost. Obviously if its cheaper to build a new one than send the shuttle launch to repair it, a sad commentary on the cost of shuttle launches, you can launch another, but if it takes 5 years to build a new one you are dead in the water for a long period.
The ability to service Hubble with the Shuttle proved priceless, you wonder if this new Hubble will regret not having that luxury.
I wonder if the CEV will be able to reach it if they actually manage to ever build one.
@de_machina
Didn't think so, but I felt he deserved a chance to back up his bullshit.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
...but if it takes 5 years to build a new one you are dead in the water for a long period.
Why build one when you can have two for twice the price?
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
NASA has not been fully funded. What GWB has been and is doing is cutting a number of other projects (ISS, hubble, X-33 (in fact, just about all X projects)), talked about adding some money, but doing nothing.
As to science on mars, jupiter, saturn, when do you think these projects were formed up? Last year? Sorry, these were done for the last decade. Basically, these are from poppa bush/clinton time frame.
Now, as doing comparisons, I do have heard of Clinton doing LSD (but I do not doubt it). I have seen a lot of evidence of GWB doing drugs (coke, pot, etc), and it was an open secret in dallas that he used to deal coke, the same way that Clinton got around. So be careful of what you push.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The four or so inferometric telescopes have resolutions as good as Hubble, down to .001 arc-second. Recently a planet (90X Jupiter size) was imaged orbiting a star.
However these dont have Hubble's field of view or 24/7 optimal viewing hours. Further more, image the scientific leaps you'd get putting this technology in space.
...and not just better reliability: cheaper, too. The USSR has had some (often rapidly censored if possible) spectacular engineering misses, but many of their more interesting engineering accomplishments have also gone unsung.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Forex the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos vary over time and in response to environmental pressure - and back again. This is evolution in the first sense, but speaks strongly against Evolution in the second sense. It speaks of animals designed to vary. If they were going to Evolve, species would branch off from the variants and become even more extreme rather than returning to morphological home base when the selective pressure eased. They don't. And you can save a lot of time here by reading this or something like it before bringing up sickle cell anaemia, peppered moths, Archaeopterxy or any of the many other canonical failures in Evolutionary reasoning.
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People who do this kind of thing all the time specified the USD$150M launch vehicle to get 12t up to 750km. Maybe the Russkies could do it for even less?
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You picked up on Dawkins and dropped everything else.
PS, since you disparage him so much, perhaps you'll prefer this link.
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And if you think he was ridiculed, try this dude, or perhaps the classic example of scientific orthodoxy turning on their own, only 40 years later to realise that they botched it big time. The punishment for academic heresy isn't burning at the stake any more, that kind of thing is too open, rasies bad press and gets frowned upon. Nowadays they're a little more subtle: they only burn your career and reputation at the stake - and then say, behold, for there are no reputable Creationist scientists. Again I say: well, duh? What do you expect?OK, you go around and cross off any evolutionist who makes money from the sales of books and like materials and we'll call it quits.Like hell it does. Back up that assertion with a shred of evidence, go on!No worries, cross off every scientist with a direct financial interest (e.g. job security) in pushing or at least shutting up about evolution and we'll call it fair again.He certainly has - and that's exactly what was originally asked for. So here it is, why are you complaining? And why should I provide any other examples if you're just going to define them out of existence?
You're given Creationist Biologists, but you immediately disqualify any who aren't Evolutionists, because they're not Evolutionists. Tap, tap, is this thing on? Earth to Walkingshark, come in Walkingshark, is there anybody in there? Halloooo? <waves>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How about with a careful definition of evolution?
:http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/articles_debate s/evolutiondefinition.htm
:
The first page of the source you cite
Is very interesting. it states
""Evolution is a generation-to-generation change in a population's frequencies of alleles or genotypes. Because such a change in a gene pool is evolution on the smallest scale, it is referred to more specifically as microevolution"1 [emphasis in original]. This type of "evolution" is widely accepted by evolutionists and creationists alike and is not in dispute."
considering my usage and my statement:
"evolution works. That is almost indesputible.[sic] The fact that creationists think that evolution is a theory of creation however suggests that they don't know what evolution even is. the theory of evolution does not attempt to explain the origins of life or the universe."
Looking at the entire paragraph it is clear I was not referring evolution as a theory which attempts to explains the origin of life. That theory is referred to as "molecules-to-man evolution" in that source. (and beyond the scope of Charles Darwin's original theory of evolution)
In any event. there you have it.
As I said before.. I was debating atheism, not evolution.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
And yet, I'll take my Nikon 50/1.8 prime (which ran 99, new) against pretty much every other Nikon lens out there at 50 mm. Cost is not everything when it comes to glass.
That said, there is no reason to upgrade the Hubble if we can reasonably cheaply launch a new one. Hell, if we could launch a new one for *exactly the same cost* as repairing the Hubble, we should do that. We'd get more overall science out of it, because we'd have Hubble functioning until it fails, plus the new one.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
This is some kind of apples-to-oranges joke, right?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The James WEbb telescope will be great, and more modern than the Hubble telescope, but it doesn't do the same things that the Hubble does. The _original_ idea was a set of space telescopes (5?) that all looked at different frequencies and had different analysis equipment. Saying that the second in the set is a replacement for the first is, well, wrong.
Bush has effectivly killed Prometheus/JIMO.
Also has cut major NASA projects as a way to fund the Moon
NSF looks to take it in the shorts as well.
The servicing of the 80's debt and now, the GWB debts, is killing us.
I put in incendiary posts constantly and my karma's been jammed against the stops for years. Go figure.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Please don't bother bringing up Sickle Cell Anaemia, which is semi-lethal dysfunctional blood condition making you unattractive to a disease, calling that an improvement is kinda like claiming that the answer to robbery is to be poor.
No again, at least in the general sense. Unless you believe in Darwin's "pangenes" or Lamarckianism, mutations are generally not heritable. Since all observed mutations are damaging, anything which was inherited is going to - on average - cripple or kill the organism rather than improve it.Mutations are, however, reknowned for causing sterility - or to put it another way, for invoking a racially homeostatic mechanism.
That I do. Mutations destroy and disrupt, they do not build up, organise or create. This is their character.No. The observations (or in many cases compilations of others' observations) of Halton Arp and co are showing with increasing definition that we are indeed in a special place in the universe.I suspect that before you confront that point (and do go and confront it properly, don't dismiss it on the word of the maniacs at t.o), you should really be considering the ramifications of a special place existing at all.
They change, and go extinct. If by "evolve" you mean degenerate, then yes.I won't accept either that life self-organised from organic stew, or that such a stew ever existed for it to self-organise from, divine intervention or not.You would need divine intervention for either, since firstly the only stews that form by accident are simple, racemised and poisoned, and secondly even if you somehow against practically every observation of physics got an idealised protein soup, self-organsing that into enough DNA etc to make something self-reproducing is a very, very, very long uphill battle on loose shale. So long, in fact, that the universe doesn't contain anything like the required amount of ammunition.
No. Neither. I think that the date-stamp is being badly misread.To be more specific, the date stamps which are even legible are vague, yet often conflicting and nobody can show that the clocks that they all run by were either set right in the first place or ran smoothly since.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you don't have molecules-to-man, you don't have the rest. If evolution doesn't explain the origins of life (chemical evolution) then it has nowhere to begin. Working with development of life (biological evolution) is essentially pointless if there's nowhere to start.
As an Atheist, that's also foundational for you. No molecules-to-man equals no explanation for something as basic as how we got here, it equals no substantial basis for disclaiming God. That's what Richard Dawkins' "intellectually satisfied Atheist" soundbite was all about.
Microevolution is a bit of a misleading misnomer, but Evolutionists won't accept "variation within a kind" as a term so we're more or less stuck with it. Darwin's finches, ironically enough, are a striking example of this. Food became hard to find on the Canaries, so the finch populations there shifted towards longer beaks. Much jumping up and down about "evolution in action" ensued, but then when conditions improved, the birds normalised again. Not evolution, but a variation in kind already incorporated into the birdies' cute little genes.
Your original assertion was "evolution works", and neither chemical evolution nor biological evolution come within hailing distance of working.
I can understand you dismissing chemical evolution, since biological evolution looks so much more plausible at first glance. As with so many other things, the harder you look at it, the worse it gets. Darwin was only able to propose it by assuming that cells were just little blobs of jelly - if he'd known what we do today about the cell, he would have abandoned the whole idea immediately. Yes, it would have made Grandpa Erasmus with his e conchis omnia grumpy, but Charles was at least open and honest enough to know a lost cause when he could see one in all its glory. A pity so few of his fans would follow suit.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not asking you to like it, but I am calling you a moron for not checking the figure yourself. Google is only a click away so you've no real excuse.I see you've done no research here, either.
Not only was this the political church of the Dark Ages, and not only did most of the scientists and churchmen of the age side with Galileio, but Galileio actually got into trouble for being rude and political rather than because of any perceived deficiencies in his theory.
You might also want to consider the Jews who were lynched during the Black Plague because the plague didn't touch them. And why didn't it? Because they were following the hygiene rules from an old, outmoded, inaccurately copied compilation of tribal myths, formerly known as The Old Testament.
For some inexplicable reason, the science scattered through the Bible is 100% accurate, even down to naming Arcturus as highly mobile (Job 38:32) and Orion as a cluster (Job 38:81). It also says that the Earth is suspended in space, not embedded in any crystal spheres (Job 26:7). Pretty damn good for a bunch of primitive tribesmen and you'll notice that it stands with Galileio, not with the politicians. No, the Bible is not a science textbook, but yes, the science in it is accurate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Put it another way: everybody believes something about how the world works, and none of us was there to see it put together and take notes. That something, whatever it is, is a religious position.
Also, you're trying to arrogate a position for your own religious stance by claiming for it a solid basis on uninterrupted logic. You're fooling yourself. Reasoning from the known chemical and physical properties of atoms, the number of such in the known universe (10^81), the number of ways in which they can be arranged and the maximum amount of time (~10^18 seconds) they've had to so arrange themselves does not lead to the conclusion that life is possible. And yet life is all around us.
The only rational conclusions are either that materialism is hogwash or fundamental science is badly, badly wrong in practically every "hard" branch. And no, Evolution is not science. Evolution, as in molecules-to-man, is an interpretation overlaid on science by Atheists desperate to feel, as Richard Dawkins put it, "intellectually fulfilled".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that the Russian launchers have a better history of reliability than either the Shuttle or most of the conventional Western launchers. So they are cheaper and more reliable - just not politically correct.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...if you email me the URLs of some of your recent posts that you're pleased with, I'll park them to one side and consider modding them up when I next get points (typically about every 4 days). Use my forename at cyberknights com au rather than the FDNS address, lest your message get drowned in spam.
It'll help your karma a lot if you don't charge in defiantly with all guns blazing as Step One of your responses. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Good on you. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes, it can be transmitted by kissing, accidental inhalation of ejecta, many different ways.
Yes, remaining pure is even more effective than monogamy, but unfortunately it's not heritable.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...now we wait for /. to come to the party.
They will be granted a "+1 Interesting" each when the next mod points roll around. That still leaves three points unspent, so if you make any more good posts in the next week or so, email them to anything in the cyberknights.com.au domain.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In order for Evolution to work (capital E for molecules-to-man rather than the vague and prevaricating "change over time" definition), you need to find creative mutations that stick.
If you can't do that, you're just diluting the genetic information available, site by site, with junk. It's like scraping a nail or scourer across a CD and calling it "added information" - it's almost entirely added entropy, and entropy is your enemy here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Adding randomness/entropy is not adding information. As you said, selection selects from existing information, it doesn't add anything. You still lack a mechanism for adding information. Selection does indeed operate on randomness, where it is made accessible by expression. Selection removes the entropy again. Selection is, in a way, a limiting entropy filter.
If a mutation (in real life, a set of mutations are required since a single mutation is easily erased by the wonderful cross-checking built into the DNA transcription machinery) could add a structure which was genuinely advantageous, you might have a point.Not exactly.
The homeostatic machinery itself would select strongly against reproduction of a "costless" mutation even if once could be identified. No nominally helpful mutation has been identified which has arrived without a significant burden of negative properties as an intrinsic part (a "cost") of the mutation. Neither the DNA machinery nor external "natural" selection is able to separate the good and bad effects.
The genetic burden of these destructive effects is also cumulative, so the one good mutation cannot wipe out all of the baddies without also wiping out itself, and the nett effect has always been negative, entropic.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I appear to have used a word which carries a specific technical meaning in a way that conveyed the technical part of the meaning to you but not the common-use meaning, and did not intend to.
Adding randomness in the gross sense screws things up, which is not predicted by this piece of information theory. From that experience we learn that the pure information theory application is too simplistic to be useful here.
Bringing the argument back to 0, 1 or even 2 bits of information unfortunately files off all of the meaningful sidebands. What you are addressing with core information theory is very clear and elegant and has essentially zero relevance for Evolution in real life.
I could make cute assertions about not adding a "B" but adding a "?", however that wouldn't make it really clear that the problem does not fit into this framework at all, so can't really be sensibly addressed by it.
Perhaps you can tell by the way I'm re-approaching the statement from several slightly different angles, but I'm struggling to think of a clear illustration for just how poor a fit it is.
Let's try an analogy. Consider replacing one heat tile on a space shuttle with a random object - a brick, a food mixer, a cat, a block of styrofoam or perhaps more appropriately a tile from a different part of the shuttle. Information theory says that we've added information to this shuttle, which clearly distinguishes it from other shuttles. Real life says we're about to need another seven astronauts. We haven't added useful information. "Useful" is a concept a long way up the cognitive scale from an individual base-pair.
In the field, there might be billions or trillions of a particular lifeform to experiment with, and so if a significant portion of them mutate and don't die off, there ought to be perhaps thousands to millions of different extant mutations in the population for selection to work with.
In practice, there aren't. Many articles have been written about the surprising stability of E. Coli alone. E. Coli is not evolving. Yet if the information theory above was a valid application, it would obviously and continuously be so.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Information theory criticisms are common amongst creationists; thus, I assumed you were working from one. I have no clue what you are trying to refer to with "meaningful sidebands", but the principle works just the same for however many bits of information you want to extend it to; its just math, it doesn't care how many bits you want to use. I wouldn't even have brought it in, if it weren't so typical that it would be brought in by the creationist side of this argument. It isn't really the right framework to address the problem, but it does hold gross truth to apply to the problem at hand. If you want to drop the information theoretic aspect of it, I'd be happy to.
Your analogy is wrong. Why? It's very simple.
99.9% of the time, replacing that heat tile with something random would kill the shuttle. 0.1% of the time (probably less, but the exact probability is relatively unimportant) we get something that works - is useful, to use your terminology. 0.1% of those work *better* than the original. Are we agreed that these are all possible? Because that is exactly why randomness (increased entropy) is essential.
The second stage is natural selection; in this stage, we look at the designs and reproduce the most successful ones. Thus, over time our shuttle would become a veritable brick spacehouse, nearly impervious to heat. Lots of trials? Lots of time? Absolutely. But the mechanism works.
You're struggling to explain it not because its unclear, but because you are wrong.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
When you write about something, there is lots that you can't put into words, but you can do stuff that a photo can't, for example, you can describe smells, sounds, the temperature, wind, your own feelings, all manner of stuff that won't fit through the lens, and some of which might drastically change a listener's perception of the scene. OTOH, the sensor behind the lens captures an enormous amount of detail which words could never adequately convey, even though you published an encyclopaedia describing just one scene. Video would also capture sound and motion, but at a lower resolution. Each method loses some richness somewhere, and that can be important.
Here is where those sidebands come into play, and we run into several critical features of the situation which completely invalidate your approach. Interestingly enough, natural selection is one of the key problems in your scenario.
Problem number one: suppose that the Shuttle started out with a high-wing design, but that turbulence rendered it much less practical than the present configuration. So sooner or later we get a randomly mutated Shuttle in which one of the wings is lower - and it promptly destabilises on re-entry and scatters itself all over the landscape. Then one fine aeon we get another Shuttle with both wings a little lower - but because the main spar has to run through the body instead of across it, the SSME's don't work so well any more, so it never hits orbit. It seems obvious that massive changes are going to be disruptive enough to prevent an advancement in wing placement by large steps. This is opaque to the probability theory you're using.
Problem number two: we get a Shuttle with one wing only a centimeter lower than the other. We are hopeful that our candidate is the first in a long line leading to low-winged Shuttles. We watch and wait expectantly, but since the difference in wings conveys no immediate advantage, our Shuttle is not selected for an the low-wing gene is eventually diluted to extinction by the many, many copies of the high-wing gene. This is also opaque to the probability theory you're using.
Problem number three: Shuttles take resources to build. You get a finite number of Shuttles over a finite span of time to experiment with. The probability theory so far deployed is too simplistic to incorporate such limitations, but they have decisive effect on the possible outcomes.
You may well argue that there are a lot of microbes with very short generation times, and there are, but it's still a very long way short of enough candidates to explain the supposed derivatives we now see - and of course the argument disintegrates completely when faced with whales, turtles or macaw, all of which have quite long generational times.
There are many more problems, but it's a busy day today.
Not to mention incapable of making orbit. Oh, well...
Even if I were to cede you that in its entirety, which I don't, the mechanism han't got anything like the traction to explain what we observe.
Problem number four: not all of the unhelpful modifications will have
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I saw an old Pogo cartoon, maybe republished in one of Carl Sagan's books, where two characters pondered this question.
(Pogo was written about Washington politics. But it was set in a dark swamp, and the characters were cute little swamp creatures. The characters were often fishing from a dilapidated skiff.)
In the strip in question, as near as I can recall, went like this:
Panel one: "Did you ever think, that we live in a Universe, full of stars, all circled by planets,, and that each of them could have life on it, just like us?"
Panel two: "Or maybe the Earth is unique? Maybe it is the only inhabited planet in the whole Universe? Maybe we are completely alone?"
Panel three:
Panel fout: The other critter replies: "Either way, it is a sobering thought."
So, how about giving us the 25, or 50 word summary of Arp's reasoning?
Degenerate is a value lade, anthropocentric term. I think biologists prefer to use terms like adapted or adaptive.
Consider zebra mussels, they were well adapted to living in the Great Lakes. And when they were accidentally introduced there, there was a population explosion. If the Great Lakes environment were to change, they might not be adapted any longer. They could die off.
Langauge shapes are thoughts. Certain ideas were literally inconceivable until some genius invented the terms to talk about them. May I suggest that you disrupt your ability to give the other view a fair examination if you restrict yourself from using the terms you challenge.
In that great 13 part series, "The Ascent of Man", Jacob Bronowski talked about sitting beside his little new born daughter, and marvelling at how perfect her little hands were. He describes thinking, "Her little hands are so perfect, I couldn't design something so perfect I I had a million years!" Then he says, "Of course a million years is how long it took."
Your assertion that the assembly of simple life, or proto-life, from a "stew", was impossible, is unproveable. It is an assertion based on faith, not fact. Just as if I were to assert the opposite I would be relying on faith, not fact.
Hold on, you said you accepted "Natural Selection". Now it sounds like you don't. Of course mutations that kill the individual before they can reproduce are not inherited. Is that all you mean? But where do you get the idea that "all observed mutations are damaging"?
- Since observation shows us redshifted objects clustered into "shells" around us, we must be near the middle of stuff; and
- since the focus of the changes in redshift is consistent and not exactly on us, it's not an instrument or observation error; and
- since the data has been gathered by different observers at different observatories at different times, it is not an experimenter's error, and nor is it transient; and
- since many physically associated objects with different redshift and a smooth redshift gradient between them exist, redshift is probably not (or not primarily) a measure of expansion; and
- since it involves the entire visible universe, it's not a localised effect (hyper galactic explosion or whatever); it follows that
- We are a cosmic stone's throw from the center of the universe.
How unlikely is that?Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is just local granularity... so what?
I don't know what you mean by physically associated objects or smooth redshift gradient.
You write this as if you knew the shape of the Universe. You know that the Universe has a center? A finite but unbounded Universe would not have a center. How do you know that the Universe is not finite but unbounded?
Well, it is an amusing argument. Would you challenge the interpretation of the fossil record that, not only does it include extinct animals, but absent are the species found today? If so, how do you account for this apparent absence?
Do you discount molecular biology? Molecular biologists argue that we can measure how closely related individuals are by looking at their genes. Do you reject that the same technology that can establish paternity, or link a suspect, or forensic remains to a blood stain, can measure how closely related different species are?
So, if new species don't evolve from old ones, how do you explain the genetic consanguity?
In an earlier comment you said that we didn't live in a young Universe with a forged date-stamps -- that the various date stamps were being misinterpreted.
You realize that leaves you a lot to explain?