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NASA To Determine Hubble's Fate
clickclickdrone writes "According to the BBC NASA is debating whether or not to send astronauts in to space to service the Hubble telescope. Without intervention it is thought to be good for another 24-36months.
Given the quality of images and data it has produced since it's launch, it sounds like a no brainer to me but the people who hold the purse strings are rarely predictable when it comes to spending money."
Well, Cassini-Huygens did find hydrocarbons on Titan. Don't know if Hubble was involved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-Huygens
science is a religion
Because of how the Hubble Telescope works, it would do a very crummy job of imaging Earth.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Or maybe Google to grab it turn it round and use it to map the earth down to the smallest pebble.
I'm sure you're just being facetious, but I figured I'd note for anyone that finds this sort of thing interesting, the Hubble can't track the earth. It's moving too fast, any images taken would end up as a streaky blur. Earth slides beneath it at something like 4 miles per second, and the shutter on the Hubble is intended for long exposures.
The Hubble doesn't even have the resolution to pick out the lunar landing sites. For all the amazing work it's done over the years, it's specs really aren't that impressive in modern terms.
As I understand it, the real problem is that a service mission would cost more than a replacement for the Hubble; which would have better optics, improved insturments, better reliability, etc.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Of course the presence of oil on another body would show that life once existed there. What book have you read that said that oil can be created in any manner other than through decomposing biological material?
How about "Dissociation of Methane into Hydrocarbons at. Extreme (Planetary) Pressure and Temperature.", by F. Ancilotto, G. L. Chiarotti, S. Scandolo, and E. Tosatti, in the February 28, 1997 issue of Science? Their molecular dynamics simulations show that methane is likely to breakdown into a mixture including ethane, butane, and even alkanes (i.e. oil) at the high pressures and temperatures found deep within the interiors of Neptune and Uranus. No living organisms involved.
Let me guess, you probably think that oil is an infinite resource that magically renews itself.
Even when you feel certain that you're right, you should try to be more polite about it just in case you're wrong. Otherwise people may end up giving your opinions the same disdain you've shown to others.
It sounds like you saw the topic, immediately thought "abiotic oil nutjob", and hurried to wail on him. However, just because you recognize the biological history of oil on Earth doesn't mean you have to jump to the conclusion that no other processes operate elsewhere. Take that attitude too far and you'll end up trying to find the alien messages in pulsars.
Interesting, which institution's astronomers are you "rubbing elbows" with? I'm a physicst, not an astronomer, but of all the astronomy faculty, post-docs, and grad students at my institution I know of only a single professional astronomer (out of dozens, maybe even approaching 100+) that favors phasing out Hubble, and that's only because he is a PI in a Hubble replacement proposal. And this includes astronomers that primarily study UV w/ Chandra, and radio at other telescopes and don't even use Hubble, people studying universe structure with ground-based Sloan surveys, theorists not even using any telescopes at all, they all still support Hubble 100%.
Adaptive optics are nice for ground-based imaging, but most of the actual astrophysical research makes use of spectra, identifying things like atomic emissions and absorptions, temperatures, redshifts/blueshifts, etc. Eg, finding hints of iron in black holes, discovering that galaxy arms are moving faster than allowed for by galactic mass (hints of dark matter), studying Zeeman splitting for measuring magnetic fields of distant objects, etc. Atmospheric artifacts may be alleviated with adaptive optics, but spectras are still fundamentally important and are vastly superior with space-based telescopes. Especially so for looking at IR and UV wavelengths, where the atmospheric attenuation is prohibitively large.
Additionally, imaging is superior in space when looking at faint objects that need very long acquisition times. The atmospheric noise floor (due to scattered light) is too high for ground-based observatories doing reasonably long-term acquisitions (days) to compete with space-based observatories.
make world, not war