Slashdot Mirror
Final Repair Mission To Extend Hubble's Life
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."
Yes, there was a flaw in the mirror. I remember the size of the flaw being described at a space museum tour as:
"Take one strand of your hair. Cut it lengthwise 36 times; take one of those strands and cut it another 36 times lengthwise."
To me, that just underscores the difficulty in putting a telescope in space. True, the flaw was considered a debacle, but NASA fixed it by correcting the instruments on the telescope by an equally offsetting amount. This has led to amazing discoveries and the Hubble can largely be viewed as a success.
In my mind, it's a shame that we won't be keeping it running past 2013.
rm -rf
Are the advantages of having Hubble outside the atmosphere still worth the expense? I'd rather see NASA spending their money on Mars.
I thought I had heard that new ground-based telescope technology has largely made the benefits of the old Hubble obsolete. Does anyone know anything more specific on that?
True, but I would argue that Hubble and the Mars rovers have done far more to promote space science to the masses. In an era where scientific research is often the first thing on the chopping block, the importance of projects like Hubble should not be underestimated.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
That would be a complicated robotic mission, but there is a further complication... Once enough gyros fail, it will start to tumble. That would make a servicing mission near impossible. (you could no longer just grab it.)
So once NASA decides that we need to go anyway, why bother to de-orbit it? Servicing Mission 3B was in 2002, if they can get another 6 years out of SM4 that will get them to 2014. If NASA is serious about replacing the shuttle, they should be able to get another manned craft into low-earth orbit by then, even if it is using an off-the-shelf launch system,
"The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind" into context. (It being the last Slashdot story in the Space section.)
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Except - they didn't replace all the on-board electronics when they installed the fix for the mirror. (Hubble's problem was a flawed mirror - not a flawed lens.)
Hint: NASA and JPL know that. You don't seem to know much of anything, since both of the 'facts' in your introductory statement are actually 'fantasies'.
While I'm glad that the Hubble is going to be repaired, after reading yesterday's article about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) that looks like it won't get delivered to the ISS due to a lack of available shuttle missions, I'm no longer sure it's the right thing to do. Seeing as the AMS took 500 physicists 12 years to build and cost $1.5 billion, and that it's capable of doing new and amazing science, I think it deserves a chance. The Hubble has already been up their for years and will be replaced in 2013 by the James Webb Space Telescope anyway. The AMS has no replacement; not launching it would be worse than not repairing Hubble.
Are the control electronics associated with the gyros failing? What gyro technology are they using?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This might sound naive, but what about attaching this thing to the ISS? Sure would make maintenance a lot more easier, with all those regular flights and round-the-clock human presence.
Is there anything fundamentally incompatible with the design of the Hubble and the ISS? (orbit, need to rotate, etc.?)
"That's a pretty poor debacle compared to, say installing an accelerometer upside down"
We fired a missile out of Vandenburg a few years ago that had the angular accelerometer wires color coded backwards. The test coil was wired correctly so all diagnostics passed.
When the missile was fired and cleared the underground silo it was normal for the missile to pitch towards 70 degrees. As it approached that angle the the speed of pitching is reduced to zero, however if the accelerometer is reverse wired then the missile pitches faster instead of slower and the missile simply cleared the silo wall and pitched level to the ground shooting across the fields at what seemed to be a thousand miles an hour and it started a couple of fires and also caused a lot of scrambling of onlookers until the range officer was able to destruct it.
We were out with our field jackets extinguishing the fires and then had to pick up all of the unburned propellant (green solid fuel).
Of course, we kept some propellant back and would ignited it in ashtrays and stuff like that as practical jokes. I wonder how I survived some of the stuff I was involved with in those days.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make