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Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
Avantare writes "Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
In a sternly worded letter to acting NASA Administrator Frederick D. Gregory, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she expects the U.S. space agency to heed the will of the Congress and keep preparations for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission on track.
Congress, in passing an omnibus spending bill late last year, directed NASA to set aside $291 million of its 2005 budget to spend planning and preparing for a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008. When NASA informed Congress just weeks later that it intended to spend only $175 million of that amount on the Hubble repair effort, some saw the move as an indication that the agency was preparing to abandon plans to service Hubble robotically and rely instead on a space shuttle crew to fix the telescope."
The problems is not that they are more dangrerous now. They have always been this dangerous. It is just that now the danger is better understood. Ignoring risk does not make it go away.
That said, I am not against using a manned (sorry, crewed) mission to repair the Hubble if that is the best option. In any case, the risks needed to be understood, reduced as much as possible and accepted or rejected; not just ignored.
I really like having Ms. Mikulski as senator, and I've voted for her each time she's been elected, but I should point out that the reason that she's pushing this isn't that she cares about getting hi-res pictures of aliens. The Space Telescope Science Institute is in Baltimore, MD, her home state, as well as NASA's Goddard facility.
That's what representatives of any sort do: they fight for their local interests. If they didn't do that, the voters would elect somebody who did. Unfortunately, without a fixed budget cap, that generally means deals of the form "You vote for my thing, so I'll vote for your thing, and the only one who loses is the guy who eventually has to pay off the debt."
So while I like Ms. Mikulski, and I support the "measly" few dozens of millions of dollars it would take to keep getting great science from Hubble, I thought a bit of disclosure would be appropriate.
You do know that NASA/Goddard is in Senator Mikulski backyard, right? Actually I'm not against her on this point, because it's my backyard too.
I think the "better option" that most astrophysicists are looking forward to is the James Webb Telescope. It's a primarily IR-telescope, but in terms of its mission statement it will largely replace what Hubble is doing now. Hubble has already survived longer than originally intended (due to many well-executed repair missions). More years could be squeezed out of Hubble with more repair missions, but if what you want is a brand-new telescope, the James Webb Telescope will keep astronomers busy for many years.
Probably been mentioned already, but a work-around for one of the major limiting factors for the Hubble's lifetime has already been found, that being the number of working gyroscopes available.
After repair, the telescope has six gyroscopes (used for pointing and stabilising the device, without any messy reaction mass involved), and it needed at least three to point accurately. There are currently only four working ones left - they're somewhat unreliable.
However, a way of pointing the telescope with just two working gyroscopes has been tested recently, which should extend the lifespan a little - possibly until 2008. I still doubt that a full-scale repair mission will be launched, but this might help in filling the gap until a replacement is finalised...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The main problem with repairing hubble is the fact that ther is no longer any shuttle capable of containing it in it's hold
This is only a problem if you want to return HST safely to the ground in a Shuttle cargo hold. As you say, there is no longer a shuttle in which it will fit, because the external airlock for ISS makes the bay too short.
However, for a repair mission, HST does not have to fit in the cargo bay; it is mounted inside the bay sticking straight up out of it.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
First of all, NASA almost never builds straight replacement instruments. They are always focused on something new. JWST will not replace Hubble by any means. In fact, if both were up at the same time (sustained, not about-to-be-junk), the amount of additional science able to come from their complementary instrumentation should be reason alone to keep Hubble strong until it launches.
Astronomy in the ultraviolet is all but mothballed for a decade if one of the instruments (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, COS) slated for installation in Hubble does not make it to orbit somehow. The only functioning instrument right now is GALEX, an imaging experiment.
However, when we obtain spectra, the ultraviolet, more than any other waveband, gives us tremendous direct information about the atomic composition of many astronomical objects. (Molecules are best studied in the radio part of the spectrum. Solid particles [e.g. dust] in the infrared).
JWST will not fill this gap. It will be a great loss and put a halt to a wealth of knowledge gained from ultraviolet spectroscopy that began about three decades ago.