The Hubble Lives On

tanman writes "CNN reports that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has agreed to send astronauts on one final mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. No date was reported for the mission, other than before the shuttle fleet is retired. From the article, 'A rehab mission would keep Hubble working until about 2013. It would add two new camera instruments, upgrade aging batteries and stabilizing equipment, add new guidance sensors and repair a light-separating spectrograph. Without a servicing mission, Hubble will likely deteriorate in 2009 or 2010.'"

Comments

One final mission

[Anonymous Coward]

CNN reports that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has agreed to send astronauts on one final mission

Their sacrifice will be appreciated.

Service Lifetimes...

[steve-o-yeah]

Support for Hubble SP1 has expired. Please upgrade to Hubble SP2.

Good!

[GreggBz]

The cost of a shuttle mission, from Wikipedia.
is between $60M and $1.5B.. let the debate ensue. Not to be rude, but I'm ignoring the slight potential for human loss.
So many more people die in Iraq or Alaskan Crab Fishing or.. well.. you get the point.
I'm sure there will be other missions and shuttle maintenance and general program costs in 2007 whether we fix the Hubble or not. So, it's logical to factor the cost of this mission kind of inversely, thinking rather, how much will we save if we do not repair the Hubble? Probably not a whole $1.3B estimated one way in the link above, much less.

Regardless of how you intemperate the numbers, I think this is a good idea because:

The Hubble works, and we have experience servicing and fixing it, so it's much more likely that all of this will go smoothly.
We can get this done soon, whereas development of a another new telescope will undoubtedly take many times longer.
The Hubble is very meaningful. It's still returning good science and inspirational pictures.
It's functioning keeps a quite few scientists employed, and that's a good thing.
It's good press. NASA needs to flourish. I think the "new NASA" is just starting to hit it's stride, despite an
otherwise depressed national consciousness. We've had lots of enormously meaningful and successful unmanned missions lately, so yay NASA.

Re:Backup for the shuttle

[MightyYar]

Are they doing this because they're afraid of risking the shuttle or is NASA afraid of risking the astronauts?

Obviously the astronauts. They'd hate to lose another vehicle because it would probably end the shuttle program. However, the American people do not like 7 dead astronauts and neither does NASA. We would mourn astronauts more than the shuttle.

Manned spaceflight would never have gotten off the ground if NASA had exhibited such risk averse behavior almost 50 years ago.

This is probably a fair statement, but there is no need to take risks like that to accomplish the current goals in space. We don't accept 1950's technology or safety standards in construction, aviation, automobiles, or health care - I see no reason to accept it in space. You certainly could argue that our goals are not lofty enough.

You DO still see that risk-taking spirit, though. Spaceship One was pretty seat-of-the-pants.

Re:Who would have thought that

[CorSci81]

Keck does exceed Hubble's capabilities for most practical and scientific purposes, and definitely with the dramatic improvement of adaptive optics technology some of the impetus for an optical space telescope is gone. That said, AO isn't perfect so there are still some uses for Hubble. AO can correct for a great deal of atmospheric turbulence, but Hubble still provides more stable images than current AO. Things like the deep field images still aren't terribly practical with a telescope such as Keck because sky brightness is less severe in space, particularly in certain parts of the spectrum (a factor of 600 at 1.5 microns). Also, certain bands are still severely attenuated by the atmosphere even at the altitude of the Keck observatory (and remember, most of the suitable land-based sites are already taken). Keck is a more sensitive telescope owing to its size, so it can detect fainter objects, but remember, we're comparing a two 10m telescopes to a telescope that's around 2.5m. If we put something even modestly larger than Hubble in space it would still be better than Keck for imaging.

Re:Who would have thought that

[Explo]

Regarding the replacement (well, close enough, even though the JWST is more focused on infrared observations); yes, it's hopefully going to be launched to the space around 2013 or so. However, Hubble won't last that long and it would be quite inconvenient to have a gap of several years between them without any comparable IR/visible light telescopes in space.

Regarding the ground-based telescopes, while adaptive optics and other fancy things allow them to outperform Hubble in some ways such as resolving power, there are still things they can't do. The ground-based telescopes are unable to observe anything for a significant part of the time because sun is happily shining on the sky and reflecting off the atmosphere. Likewise, no matter where you place the telescope under the atmosphere, weather will occasionally be an issue and atmosphere also tends to absorb some of the wavelenghts, although that's not a big issue on visible light. Additionally, atmospheric glow, no matter whether it's from reflected light pollution or natural, makes observations of very dim targets more difficult on the ground.