Slashdot Mirror
No Formal Risk Analysis of Hubble Rescue by NASA
Somegeek writes "
SpaceDaily.com is running a story that
NASA never performed a formal risk analysis of a shuttle mission to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope before they decided to cancel the mission on grounds of risk. The story quotes Fred Gregory, the current acting NASA administrator, as stating that previous NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe made the decision "based on what he perceived was the risk". This perceived risk is in performing a manned shuttle mission that is out of range of using the International Space Station as an emergency refuge. The Hubble's current batteries and gyroscopes will probably fail in a few years, leaving the dead telescope to crash back to earth around year 2020."
You could, its just that Hubble is so massive that it world take a ridiculous amount of fuel.
For instance to get Hubble to the same orbit as ISS you are looking at about 40 tonnes of fuel. To get to a gravity neutral point (say earth-moon LaGrangian) would take a lot more than that.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Can you kindly tell us which missions/telescopes are more useful than the MOST important astronomical instrument in the HISTORY of man? It was always funny when people try to use the JWT as a perfect replacement even though its not versatile as the Hubble. Sure ground based telescopes have come a long way but will never be able to view parts of the spectrum which are filtered by out atmosphere.
It's the rolling boulder thing. Sure, you could slow a ten ton rock from rolling down a steep hillside, but it's going to require a much bigger machine.
Slowing the decent of a ten ton satelite is going to reqire a much bigger machine (and incredibly precise timing), and lots more fuel than it would if it was simply snatched when it was standing still (relatively, that is).
http://www.airsafe.com/events/space/astrofat.htm/M anagement/shuttleContractorsUnderScrutiny.html/
i a.htm/
For starters but with regard to the 27 January 1967 entry. That accident was due to poor work on that unit.
http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Safety_Issues/Risk
http://www.floridatoday.com/columbia/113003columb
That was within 2 mins of googling. My bad for thinking it was common knowledge
Jonathanjk.com
My work requires both high spatial resolution and spectral resolution from the UV through NIR (esp. in UV and blue wavelengths); the HST was undoubtedly most suitable for achieving my objectives. However, it no longer carries the working spectroscopic instrument and hence the HST is no longer a viable asset for my need.
Today, it is probably more cost-effective to go back to expendable space missions. It's not at all hard to build a 2-m class space telescope. It's not servicable, but for the cost of servicing, we can build another telescope with a similar specification. So if one breaks, we can launch another.
The only retarded thinking I have is that I don't want to feed the STScI to create the monopoly in the space-based astronomy. The HST is costing a lot more than other missions (x2 FTE is what I heard, compared to other major missions) for little return in terms of the telescope operation and calibration. This is the institution that produces very crappy software to handle the HST data (I've written my own code to process and done my own calibration to improve its science return...why was the STScI not doing that?). They allocate their budgest lucratively toward the support for scientists (not operator or calibration staffs) while other missions suffer from severe budget cuts and RIF'ing their science staffs.
I would much rather have them take it back down to earth and put in a museum. What a magnificent object, how great it be to see it and thank it for all it has done for us and our planet. It just seems wrong to let it burn. We owe it more than that.
I'm getting emotional just thinking about it.
I, too, think that would be fantastic- but the recovery cost would be enormous. You'd basically be talking about a $100,000,000 exhibit.
Probably a little steep....
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about, there are many wavelengths that can't be covered from the ground and that are not properly covered by and other space telescope, specially in the UV.
Hubble has some other great advantages over any ground telescope: a much darker background, and possibility of _much_ longer observation times, for certain things this is not important, but for other tasks this is _fundamental_.
When you request some time at Hubble you already have to explain _why_ that task can't be done in any other way, so Hubble is already being used only for things that can't practically be done with anything else.
And JWST wont help with this, because as anyone with a clue knows, it's designed to _complement_ Hubble, not to replace it, and their capabilities do not overlap.
Currently there are not even plans to build anything that could replace what Hubble provides.
And for those that say that Hubble is old, thanks to the previous Shuttle missions to it, many of it's instruments have been replaced with much better and improved versions keeping it at the front of the state of the art.
(Actually the cancelled servicing mission was going to install some really cool and powerful bits that costed various hundreds of millions of $ and now are just gathering dust)
So stop the FUD already and inform yourself.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
Hubble can see in wavelengths that don't make it to the ground.
For ground based telescopes to equal Hubble, you'll need to either remove the atmosphere, or fix Hubble (or replace it).
Sure, but as I point out in my response to another poster, none of that is funded to the level you would need to fix Hubble.
They are now servely cash stripped and its impossible with a mere 8 billion dollar budget to put man on mars. The figure could be ten times that.
But yes this killed Hubble since it would make it expensive and distract for Nasa's new mission.
I doubt it. I don't think Hubble or the mars mission will be funded. The real money for Mars is supposed to be spent after Bush leaves office, so I can virtually gaurentee you it'll never happen. I think the whole thing is kind of a dodge to defund everything but ISS and the Space Shuttle, since doing otherwise would cause a reallocation in jobs across congressional districts.
Nasa does risk assesments for everything. Its odd nasa would make such a quick decision if it were not political.
But that's the point. Politics is the major component of every decision at (or about) NASA. Did you ever wonder why the space shuttle has windows?