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Final Repair Mission To Extend Hubble's Life

Posted by kdawson on from the gyros-batteries-and-a-quart-of-oil dept.

necro81 writes "The NYTimes has an in-depth piece describing an upcoming shuttle mission, scheduled for next August, to make a final service call to the Hubble Space Telescope. After the Columbia accident and the scheduled shuttle decommission in 2010, additional service trips to the telescope were off the table. The resulting hue and cry from scientists, legislators, and the public forced NASA to reconsider. Next August, if all goes well, Atlantis will grab Hubble, replace its aging gyros, attempt to revive the Advanced Camera for Surveys, and install a new camera and spectrograph. The telescope could then continue doing science well into the next decade."

10 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. No way by Quadraginta · · Score: 3, Informative

    Nonsense. COBE was far more significant. There's much more to science than pretty pictures!

    1. Re:No way by Anti_Climax · · Score: 2, Informative
      COBE did help to create This pretty picture.
       
        From the XKCD Store page:

      The graph on the back of the shirt is data from the COBE mission, which looked at the background microwave glow of the universe and found that it fit perfectly with the idea that the universe used to be really hot everywhere. This strongly reinforced the Big Bang theory and was one of the most dramatic examples of an experiment agreeing with a theory in history -- the data points fit perfectly, with error bars too small to draw on the graph. It's one of the most triumphant scientific results in history.
      --
      Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
  2. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by wildsurf · · Score: 5, Informative

    And where Apollo was a triumph in engineering, Hubble is a triumph in pure science.
    Well, except for that pesky myopia debacle.
    --
    Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
  3. Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? by Aardpig · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, the fact that our atmosphere is opaque to UV? If you want to do UV observations, and in particular UV spectroscopy, then going above the atmosphere is the only way to do it. Nothing on the ground will *ever* be able to observe in the UV.

    Similar considerations apply to the mid- and far-IR -- the Spitzer space telescope can access wavebands that are simply not visible from the ground.

    --
    Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
  4. Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? by ThreeGigs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ozone blocks ultraviolet, water vapor absorbs strongly in the infrared, dust particles et al emit in infrared too, causing a huge loss of contrast.

    Sadly, the atmosphere isn't really as transparent as it looks once you get outside the visible spectrum, and that's where 50% (a statistic made up on the spot) of astronomy breakthroughs are.

    Future scopes in space are likely to be infrared (Webb), ultraviolet, radio and x-ray specific. Plus, adaptive optics are still only a band-aid(R) compared to viewing outside the atmosphere.

  5. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by khallow · · Score: 2, Informative

    The flaw was a lot bigger than that. As I dimly recall it, they did a "knife edge" test on the Hubble and placed the edge significantly out of place. Supposedly, a human could have easily run the knife edge test and detected the flaw visually. But the error was done precisely to around an eighth of a wavelength of visual light (not sure what the frequency was). So it was possible to get good pictures just by processing the images. Further, the precision of the error meant that the corrective optics restored almost all of the telescope's resolving power.

  6. Re:The kind of science we all need by twiddlingbits · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hubble does not "see" the pictures you find published. The data is a series of binary values in different frequencys and intensities depending on what filter is in use and which "camera" (WFC or COS) it came from. The colors are "false" colors created on the ground to match the data values as closely as possible.

  7. Re:Will it really be the last trip? by Iskender · · Score: 4, Informative

    IIRC we cannot, by treaty, just let the Hubble's orbit decay like Skylab & Mir, we need to do a de-orbit burn and drop it in the Pacific, or some other relatively safe place. The problem was this, is that the Hubble has no rocket engines on board, so we need to send something up there to attach an engine.
    From TFA:

    In one additional piece of business, the astronauts will attach a grapple fixture to the bottom of the telescope so that a robot spacecraft could grab it and attach a rocket module in the future. The rocket would then drop the telescope into the ocean.


    They seem to be thinking ahead, almost like it was their job or something. : )
  8. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by CJ145 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In 2013 there is suppose to be a new telescope that should be capable of replacing Hubble. http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/

  9. Re:Mixed feelings by moosesocks · · Score: 2, Informative

    To be perfectly fair, the JWST will *not* be a drop-in replacement for the Hubble, as it's going to be primarily geared toward observing the infrared spectrum, whereas the Hubble is capable of observing everything between Ultraviolet and Infrared (visible light obviously being included between the two)

    Although there's indeed a great value of having a dedicated IR scope up there, I think that astronomers would agree that keeping the Hubble in orbit will be a very good thing, not to mention the obvious benefits of having two scopes versus one (on the other hand, if it's cheaper to build another Hubble that indeed does fulfill all of the important roles of the current one, than I agree that NASA should by all means pursue that route)

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose