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Hope for Hubble
yulek writes "It may not be over yet. space today reports that Bush's NASA administrator nominee, Michael Griffin, wants to revisit the Hubble decision. Space.com has some more details.
The big question is: do we really want to save Hubble for the right reasons or is it more of a symbolic thing? Considering NASA's fiscal woes, is this a waste of funds?
I have loved the Hubble images for the last decade, and the research that stemmed from them, but I think that the most incredible camera we've ever made may need more than just an upgrade. Perhaps it is obsolete."
There was a proposal floated a little while ago to build a replacement for HST from spare parts that already exist and launch it on top of an expendable rocket. The kicker is that it would not cost much more than the servicing mission! I guess it has more to do with the name 'Hubble' than anything else. In a related story, why do they keep calling them gyroscope when they really are reaction-wheels?
There's nothing wrong with taking another look at the situation. After all, O'Keefe wasn't exactly thorough in the analysis.
;) Not only will it find terrestrial planets, but even be able to do spectral analyses on their atmospheres.
Personally, I'll be happy when the ESA gets Darwin up
Margaret Thatcher died the other day. It was a sad day, but I like to think that she's looking up at us right now."
I generally consider things to be obsolete when they have been replaced by something better. How does this apply to Hubble?
samrolken
If you have a copy of the Hubble Manual, 24 April 1990, NASA will pay you $10,000.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Saving Hubble will cost at least $500 million. That money could be used to keep all of the other spacecraft that are being considered for termination operating for a few years. There is a more capable replacement, the JWST, on the way in 2011. The only reason they are revisiting the Hubble decision is to appease Senator Mikulski of MD. Oh yeah, Griffin came from APL which is also in MD. You connect the dots.
-- Instant Karma's gonna get you! [320848 = 2*2*2*2*11*1823]
Considering how low it takes to get a probe beyond Pluto and the strange pull on the spacecraft (it is off where it should be) and the low cost of continuing to monitor the probes, the voyeger missions should be continued too. Cutting them saves very little money but the budget is so tight that to save one or two mil, we are cutting these very important programs.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
In general, use of the word "we" around here refers to be people who don't, as a group, have the slightest idea what they're talking about, let alone any intention of making any contribution themselves.
This is a perfect example. Given the inability "we" have to understand why false color images are used, I find it hard to imagine that "we" have an informed opinion on the utility of the Hubble.
My impression is that the posters here who do know what they're talking about run about 80-20 against hanging on to the Hubble.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If you don't have $400M to fix a space telescope, you're not going to get $4B+ to build a new one.
Consider, further, that if a hypothetical new telescope has a $400M sticker on it today, it'll cost at least $4B by the time Congress is done splitting up the contracts so as to maximize the amount of pork (and therefore votes) allocated.
Consider, still further, the probability that this (or any other) administration is ever going to agree to spending one thin time on science. People into science tend to think. People who think tend not to vote as predictably. It's therefore in every Congressman's long-term interest to reduce the proportion of such people among the population.
This isn't an R-vs-D flame. Space telescopes harm Republican politicians by draining money away from faith-based initiatives that would otherwise be used to indoctrinate the next generation of Republican voters, but they also harm Democrat politicians by draining money away from social programmes that foster the kind of nanny-state dependency that produces the next generation of Democrat voters.
I support keeping the Hubble - even if obsolescent, it's better than nothing. And "nothing" is what we'll end up with if we let it crash and burn.
As prior art, I cite the X-33 and other Shuttle replacements, all of which were canned years ago.
I think your question, is Hubble obsolete, is the wrong question to ask.
Hubble IS obsolete. And will be replaced by the http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/JWST. But the JWST won't launch until August, 2011.
Hubble will die soon. So what are scientists to do from 2006 until August 2011? Although we have many world class telescopes on earth, all of them have to contend with the atmosphere, plus earth's orbit - its rotation around the sun affect which part of our sky is visible at night, and because of this annoying thing called "day", those telescopes can only be used at night, which further restrict which part of the universe can be viewed at any given moment.
I'm not insulting earth-based telescopes, but I do believe we need to keep Hubble functioning until the JWST is ready. For safety, Hubble should operate a few months after the JWST is launched, just in case the JWST has flaws that are only discovered after launch... remember Hubble's mirror flaw which required an additional flight to fix?
Tepp
The Hubble Space Telescope stands for everything NASA has done right in the last 12 years. At the completion of STS-61, the mission to replace the warped mirror, NASA's approval rating was at it's highest since the launch of Columbia. Possibly since the Apollo missions. Besides saving a $1.5 billion dollar investment. The mission proved that servicing missions could be done. It opened the door to the idea that in orbit manufacutring and repairs weren't just science fiction.
Since then Hubble has increased our understanding of the universe 10 fold. Its more than just a space telescope, it's a national monument. I think every effort should be made to keep it in working order until the technology exists to safely return it to Earth intact so it can be displayed at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum
Free MacMini
Maybe they can turn it around, point it at earth and use it to film new episodes of Star Trek Enterprise!
This sounds just like the Terri Schiavo case, except set in space!
Even though 90 percent of the public is way more interested in pictures from Hubble than they are in the International Space Station (ISS) or any moon base, the scaredy-cats in DC don't want to risk fixing it with the military space shuttle, so they can send more spy satellites up instead.
Sigh. It will soon be replaced with something better from the EU or Japan anyway.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Nah, I was just BSing. Can't believe I got modded up.
You're ignoring the aspects of time and matter.
A better telescope could be placed in to orbit, sure.
But time on the telescope is a finite resource. If you want to look at something, you have to create a proposal, and get time scheduled on the device, get it pointed, etc.
If the Hubble still has some significant utility, and the cost to repair it is worth that additional utility, than it should be repaired.
But just being "obsolete" doesn't make it worthless, and I don't see this as a "sentimental" argument.
-- John.
As for ground-based telescopes, any space-based instrument has access to the continuous range of wavelengths, whereas ground-based telescopes (even with adaptive optics) are limited by the absorption and scattering in the atmosphere in the UV and infrared. They also don't have to deal with sky glow, which restricts both how long you can take an exposure for -- eventually the background will saturate your detector -- and also the contrast between the thing you're trying to detect and the background (think picking out a small light on a white background against on a dark background).
This is also why Earth-based telescopes are put on mountains -- to get above as much of the atmosphere as possible. Adaptive optics can improve the "seeing" (blurring caused by turbulence) and, coupled with large-diameter mirrors possible on ground-based telescopes, it will improve the resolution, but it can't deal with the other effects,
The problem with launching a replacement to Hubble is that there isn't one, right now. All space telescopes due to be launched are on very different wavelengths. Plans to build super-massive ground-based telescopes look interesting, but they aren't even started yet and there's no guarantee they'll ever get them to work.
Hubble is what we have in orbit now. Whether it stays or whether it goes, no space-based alternative will exist for a long time - maybe a decade or two after Hubble is disposed of, if no rescue is launched.
Space telescopes are vital because, although there are ground telescopes that can be programmed to correct for the distortion, the atmosphere is still not forgiving. Light that is absorbed cannot be calculated for, because you have nothing to base your calculations on. Also, most telescopes are either on top of active volcanos, in Earthquake zones, or in Hurricane-prone regions. It's impressive there are any left standing. One geophysical mishap could set the science of astronomy back thirty or forty years, maybe more.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bad analogy, actually. Many studies have shown that it is, in fact, cheaper to maintain a used car (per year) than the cost of making car payments for that same year.
;) have supported this.
My experiences (save for the time I threw a head bolt through the hood
Note that my (current) car is old enough to drink legally; this is not hypothetical.
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Found it! Its called the Hubble Origins Probe http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/ The Hubble Origins Probe (HOP) is a proposed 2.4 meter free flying space telescope.The HOP concept is to replicate the design of the Hubble Space Telescope with a much lighter unaberrated mirror and optical telescope assembly, enabling a rapid path to launch, significant cost savings and risk mitigation. HOP will fly the instruments originally planned for the 4th HST servicing mission as well as a new very wide field imager, enhancing the original science mission of Hubble.
Methinks your professor is full of it clear to the roots of his hairpiece.
Or, let me put it to you this way:
If these ground based scopes that have been brought online in the last 5 years are so friggin great, why are we not being treated to some of their output? With the exception of the twins on Mona Kea that Mr keck financed, the rest of them have been so far as I know, built with public money. So I'm actually surprised that we have all these people preaching at us as to just how much better these new toys are in comparison to the Hubble, but frankly, I've not seen a single image to back those statements up.
If the new ones are so much better in fact, then why are TPTB so afraid to let us look at some of their image data so that we, the taxpayer, can quite writing his congress-critters asking them to save what is not just a national treasure, but IMO a treasure to all humankind.
So as Jeff Foxworthy would say, "here's your sign", you proponents of pulling the feeding tube from hubble, either put up images that prove what you're saying, or STFU. The ball is in your court.
How about some movies of the last 90 days of eta carinae for instance, its right handy even, or maybe a movie of the last 6 months of the orbital goings on around Sag A? Maybe we could prove that Sag A is indeed a black hole of 6 million suns mass. And I'd love to see you attempt to duplicate the pair of really really deep space images, showing stuff over 10 billion light years away, that I'm using for 2 of my screen backgrounds here. But of course, being inside the atmosphere, thats simply impossible for ground based scopes.
Maybe the hubble is obsolete, but as yet, I've seen nothing that can touch what its done. The JW scope works at different wavelenghts, so it won't be able to replace the hubble. Supplant it, confirm each others findings maybe, but not "replace" it, they simply do 2 different jobs.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
How is it obsolete? Is the 200 inch Hale(?) telescope at Palomar obsolete? It was put in service about the same time as my mother,who is also still in service due to large government expenditures. Obsolete, hardly. How can you put a value on sentiment? People place great value on sentiment, not so much on the Hubble per se, but pictures taken from a fancy camera in orbit, which takes picture like no other. If work was already commencing on a new space telescope, a launch date set eith minimal downtime of the ability to take these pictures, then, ok. However, think of the true value of what the Hubble has done for all of us who are touched by its images, and how they have brought us all a little closer to grasping the immensity of what is out there and marvel of its beauty. The USA can afford this for both its scientific and spiritual benefits (like Dao and Buddist spiritual, not intending to imply or annoy Right Wing Religious Christian Fundamentalist zealots).
As someone working on the Hubble robotic servicing mission (I know most /.ers will say this biases my opinion; really it just means I can speak from a position of knowledge), I can state 100% that this mission can be done, and can be done on schedule.
Let me break down the phases of the mission for those who are unaware:
1.) Launch - needs little explanation - a Delta IV or Atlas V heavy lift launches the HRV into Hubble's orbital plane
2.) Checkout & Commissioning - The robot arm and other HRV elements are tested and verified operational
3.) Orbit Phasing & Rendezvous - The craft will be commanded to approach Hubble. Autonomous systems will be used to coordinate the final stages of this approach, using technologies currently being proven out on the XSS-11 spacecraft which launched this week, and to be launched next week on the DART spacecraft.
4.) Capture & Berthing- The robot arm is set up for capture, and when the vision system determines that the end effector is within tolerances, an autonomous capture is performed. HRV is performing station-keeping until just before, and when HRV and HST are known to have a negative relative drift rate (receding), the capture process is allowed to begin. A capture ends with the arm grappled to one of HST's shuttle grapple fixtures. The vision system is in development, and the hardware has been space-proven for the past ~20 years on Shuttle... in fact the exact same end-effector design has been used on all previous HST servicing missions. After Capture, the arm decelerates HST and then engages it into the HRV latches (same latching arrangement as on a shuttle servicing mission).
5.) Battery Augmentation - HST's batteries will die soon, and are one of the prime schedule drivers for the mission. The dexterous robot (two armed robot) connects wire conduits from the HRV batteries to the outside of HST and routes solar array power to them. The hardest part of this task is transfering the 2 prime or 2 redundant connectors on each of the port and starboard diode boxes (located just under the solar array masts). This operation has been proven out on the ground, using a validated flightlike 1G testbed version of the actual dexterous robot, and a hi-fi Hubble mockup. In fact I think operators demo'd this very op just yesterday for maybe the 20th time. Trust me... it's highly doable.
6.) Changout WideField and add Gyros - The gyroscopes are the next most likely item to fail on HST, and are another schedule driver. With the new two-gyro mode currently under investigation, the lifetime of HST could likely be extended beyond the 2007 timeframe. The Rate-Gyro Assemblies are attached conveniently to the outside of WFC3, the replacement wide-field camera for WFPC2. WFPC2 is the camera responsible for most of the majestic galaxy and planetary photographs we seen in the news and magazines. WFC3 will improve yet again over that. Changing out WFPC2 involves de-mating the internal connectors, removing the ground-strap, unlatching the instrument, and sliding it out of the -V3 radial instrument bay rails. The old instrument is transported down to a stowage location in the HRV, and the new instrument is installed in the empty HST bay in the reverse sequence. This entire operation has been demo'd several times over the past year.
7.) Changeout COSTAR - After the two critical repairs (batteries and gyros), we move into the get-aheads and upgrades. The COSTAR instrument, sitting in axial bay 4, has performed corrective optics functions since its installation during the first servicing mission. Now that all HST instruments are built with integrated corrective optics, this instrument is obsolete, and can be replaced by something more productive; the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). To perform the changeout, the robot must unlatch and open the -V2 aft shroud doors, attach a handling fixture to COSTAR, attach a connector transfer panel to the handling fixture, transfer the 4 COSTAR harness connectors, transfer the ground
Only an poorly informed idiot, or a non-astronomer, would say this. I got a proposal through this year to do some imaging work on a class of objects known as "post-starburst quasars." I can't really do the same project with any other telescope ANYWHERE. Is that obsolete?! The Hubble Space Telescope, especially one refurbished and updated with new insturments like COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph), can do things no other telescope in existence can do. Things that are useful. Again, only a poorly informed idiot would say it is obsolete.
There is an argument, and discussion, that should be had in an honest manner, about the cost and risk to astronauts' lives. One of my old professors became an astronaut who serviced Hubble last time, and I've thought about applying for Mission Specialist myself, so I don't take this lightly.
Mike Griffin, from what I can tell, is probably Bush's best nomination ever. I'll respect his decisions in a way I have not from the previous head. Hubble is perhaps the crowning jewel of NASA, and not to be discarded lightly. I'm not being sentimental here. I apply for Hubble time every year because the things Hubble can do can be done no other way.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)