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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."
Sell it off to the highest bidder. Some other space agency may well want to take over the maintenance and running of the telescope. Or maybe Google to grab it turn it round and use it to map the earth down to the smallest pebble.
Deleted
Tell them Hubble might have found oil on a distant planet, and that we need to take another look.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
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.
There's way more than money at stake here. Maybe Hubble is worth the risk to the astronaut's lives, but you can't just ignore that issue.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
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
Still not dead.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Besides, our current president is (seemingly) not quite sharp enought to get most of what science discovers using the HST. He'd rather have "feet on the ground" as it were, telling him things like "We've landed and claimed Mars in the name of the USA" rather than "We've made a startling discovery regarding the dynamics of planetary formation within stellar nurseries".
That said, maybe it is time we went back to the true promise of space exploration - getting mankind out into the Galaxy. There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods. Certainly a kind of heroic appeal to the act itself; and all of our robotic/remote exploration was and is intended to ultimately pave the way for manned exploration anyhow. Perhaps we know enough now to take those first tenative steps into space.
Like most coins, this one appears to have two sides.
Is the cost of building and launching a new and better satellite going to much more expensive than training astronauts, sending them to hubble to fix it and bringing them back down again?
Perhaps they could take the space elevator...:b
They should send a temp up there to fix it, perhaps the one who busted the damn thing in the first place. That'd teach him.
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If its going to cost millions/billions to fix hubble we could just replace it with modern technology. Better yet, we could have a H Prize to replace hubble. Let the private sector try to launch their own. I mean, if they can launch a shuttle to space let them do other things. NASA Cant seem to do it for under a billion.
As the whole world has benefited maybe we could pass around the hat to get this funded
Consider that while the push to put a human on the moon was mostly a marketing campaign the end result was that the public was happy to see large sums of their money spent on it. The shuttle program had similar hype but it has faded away, both from explosions and from the fact that people are bored with seeing the same thing. The Mars rovers generated some excitement as well but it was short lived.
So the administration may well be trying to generate the same kind of public support for space exploration that it had in the Apollo era. Quite often, if you let the marketing people do their thing, the end result is a gain in resources that will eventually fund more important work. Like it or don't, "We've landed and claimed Mars in the name of the USA" will result in a lot more cheering and bumper ribbons and T shirt sales than "We've made a startling discovery regarding the dynamics of planetary formation within stellar nurseries".
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I can't imagine NASA doing it for loss of face, but since a Soyuz launch is $5m vs $50M for the shuttle (which is anyway overbooked for the short remainder of it's lifetime), couldn't NASA just pay the Ruskies to take their Hubble repairman up for a day trip?
I love posts like this. I am so glad the poster had all the information NASA officials have in front of them. Plus a distinguished panel of experts to advise them. One minute we say NASA is great for having the foresight to put Hubble up their. Then we rag on them when they think the money could get more bang for the buck somewhere else.
Actually, several astronauts have spoken out in the past few years saying they were willing to go service Hubble again, despite the risks. Ie, they understand the huge scientific output that are at stake should Hubble be shut down. Additionally, the risks aren't greater than previous Hubble servicing missions, it's just that there are problems of which we were blissfully unaware previously.
make world, not war
Of course we should take into account the willingness of astronauts to go into space for this mission. Especially because astronauts are not prone to ignoring safety considerations, and so if they are willing they probably think it is reasonably safe to do so. But it is worth pointing out that in a certain sense an astronaut is not entirely a private citizen. When we lose an astronaut, it's a blow to the entire nation.
I'm just saying that just because we have astronauts willing to go doesn't mean we can neglect to take into consideration the risk to their lives.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
No one is saying not to develop new instruemnts (ie, JWST is in progress, but also Chandra and SIRTF have been launched recently and others are also on the drawing board), but Hubble is responsible for HUGE amounts of scientific research, all of which will all be brought to an abrupt halt if funding is cut off.
make world, not war
Yeah I know, the astronauts know the risks involved. Yet the risk is bigger to who manned space program should something go wrong, especially something going wrong on a mission that is "largely" optional.
The only space missions that are not entirely optional are the ones that involve recovering crew from a space station.
If we can't afford the risk to service Hubble, then we can't afford the risk to do anything else in space and should just mothball the entire manned space program right now.
The shuttle is not that big a risk. While it has flown less than expected, it has actually had better safety and reliability than was originally calculated. There have been two terrible disasters, but many flying successes. The safety of the space shuttle right now has never been higher. So if it was worth the risk to put the HST up in the first place, then it is worth the lesser risk that exists now to go up and service it.
I'm serious. Hubble is one of the space shuttle's greatest successes. If we can't risk servicing Hubble, then our entire manned space program is useless and should be scrapped. If we are going to even pretend that it isn't useless, then we should service Hubble.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
Hubble's replacement is the James Webb Telescope, and has been in the works for a long time. Slated for launch in 2013, it will have a 6.5 meter primary mirror (Hubble's is 2.4 meters), be optimized for the near-infrared (so it can see through dust clouds, and further back in time and/or farther away), and orbit at the second Lagrange point about a million miles from Earth, instead of right around Earth like Hubble. That means it won't be bothered by light from the Earth, so it can see far dimmer things, and also that it can point steadily without having to compensate for its rapid orbital motion, unlike Hubble.
Hubble is certainly very nice for crowd-pleasing photos, and it's done valuable science, but I think the astrophysics community is a lot more interested in JWST. Near IR astronomy seems much more fruitful in terms of actual science than visible, is my impression. Considering a Shuttle mission costs something like $250 million, it is not clear that the money is best spent prolonging the aging Hubble's lifetime another few years. Bear in mind the Shuttle fleet is to be grounded in 2010 anyway, so there can be no more servicing missions, and Hubble's hardware is beginning to wear out.
The extra costs per unit would be griding a new lens/mirrors and the "shipping" cost into orbit. Other development costs would be incremental. Plus, we would have more eyes in the sky for research.
Also, along the lines of another poster a fleet of NOAA immaging satalites would rule. Think of a google earth type site getting a high res refresh of the whole earth each week.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ lists the launch date as 2013. Yikes! Even still, with the cost overruns that will almost for sure happen you would think saving money now may be in everybody's best interest. Perhaps Hubble has outlived its usefulness. We can get by with our ground based observatories until then, finetune our cosmological understanding between now and then with CERN et. al, and in 7 years have that bad boy up in space with its 6.5m mirror and put Hubble to shame.
I usually refrain, but this post was damned near unreadable. Punctuation and capitalization are important.