Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

36 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Other than the Apollo missions... by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Hubble has to be NASA's greatest success. And where Apollo was a triumph in engineering, Hubble is a triumph in pure science.

    --
    Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
    1. 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.
    2. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by filterban · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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 /
    3. 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.

    4. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That, and when they fixed the lens they also replaced all of the on-board electronics, because JPL and NASA had consumed too much of the component life before the satellite was even launched into space.

      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: if you want to lifetime test a part to make sure it's reliable, don't use that part in your satellite after burning up its usable life. Buy two parts from the same batch, test one, and use the other one.

      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'.
    5. 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/

    6. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by Nimey · · Score: 4, Funny

      Fact: NASA faked the Hubble's launch into orbit. Actually, Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked it up there, and it's afraid to come back down.

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
    7. Re:Other than the Apollo missions... by Sanat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "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
  2. Re:Doing science by dakranon · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm doing Science and I'm still alive!

  3. Aging gyros? by Bobb+Sledd · · Score: 3, Funny

    I wonder if those are lamb or beef gyros...

    (Yes I know it is bad.)

    --
    "They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
  4. 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 dgatwood · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. 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.
    3. Re:No way by googleSky · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Let me further follow up on this silly comment. While producing its remarkable results, COBE was hardly "far more significant" than Hubble. COBE's measurements confirmed the isotropy or, rather, the extremely low levels of anisotropy of the CMB -- to a high order of confidence. But the CMB was actually observed decades earlier by Penzias and Wilson at Greenbank. WMAP further improved on COBE results.

      Despite Quadraginta's blinkered belief that Hubble produces only "pretty pictures!" Hubble has been crucial in the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe, a result that has turned our understanding of the universe into an utter lack of understanding: we now have no idea what comprises 96% of the universe (dark energy and dark matter). This observation apparently vindicated Einstein's lamda, which even Einstein claimed was his biggest blunder. Others, though, now speculate that the accelerated expansion could be a manifestation of temporal pathology.

      Hubble certainly has produced pretty pictures, but this weird fixation that there is somehow a "competition" between scientific instruments has simply got to stop. These missions are designed as complements to further our understanding of the physical universe.

    4. Re:No way by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 4, Funny

      COBE did help to create This [deviantart.com] pretty picture.

      What does "devian" mean?

  5. The kind of science we all need by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In my early years in physics I worked on shuttles, and then on environmental cleanups and nu-cu-lar waste disposal. Many times I used Hubble as example of what we could do right in science: so often critics have said that they never see what good could come out of it. Hubble has made that entire line of "reasoning" disappear. SEEING the results, in the visible spectrum, FREELY available... Could we find something similar for this current emphasis in biophysics? C'mon slashdot, let's take science to the masses!

    1. 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.

    2. Re:The kind of science we all need by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Just like digital cameras don't produce pictures either...

      Nor celluloid film...

      Even your retinas create images in a similar fashion, a collection of light hitting photo-sensitive receptor sites.

  6. Re:Doing science by Treskin · · Score: 3, Funny

    NASA is currently working on Zero-G stable frosting in order to stock Hubble with enough cake to do years worth of science.

  7. Advantages of Hubble still worth it? by joshamania · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? by Shooter6947 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure, adaptive optics allows ground-based 'scopes to do SOME of the things that only Hubble could previously do. However, anything requiring high-contrast imaging, photometric stability, or spectral uniformity still greatly benefits from Hubble. Given that astronomers request 10 times as much time on Hubble as there actually is, there's still plenty of science that only it can do.

    2. 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.
    3. 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.

    4. Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? by Shooter6947 · · Score: 2

      JWST may be the political successor of Hubble, but it will not replace its capabilities. JWST operates only in the infrared; Hubble's primary contributions are in the visible (and the UV). These spectral coverages are complementary. The launch of JWST (after it finishes hoovering up what's left of the NASA astrophysics budget) will not cause Hubble to become obsolete.

    5. Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? by Shooter6947 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      However you may have a point about the cost/benefit ratio. For the price of a shuttle launch to repair Hubble (~$1B), you could just about build and launch a new one on an unmanned rocket. If there were a concerted program to launch a virtually identical 2-meter telescope every 4 years with different instrumentation on it, that program would be better and cheaper than continuing to repair Hubble. However, congressional whims being what they are, such a program would inevitably get cut after its first mission, obviating the savings. Hence NASA has opted to continue to repair and update Hubble instead.

  8. After replacing the aging gyros ... by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Funny

    NASA will try to get as much positive spin out of Hubble as it can :-)

  9. Will it really be the last trip? by xlation · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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,

    1. 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. : )
  10. Sure brings by aengblom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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
  11. We all know when the end will come for hubble by Cryacin · · Score: 2, Funny

    : "If that wasn't the mother ship, what the hell did we just blow up?"
    : "The hubble telescope."

    --
    Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
  12. Mixed feelings by FridayBob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Mixed feelings by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 2, Interesting

      OMG. 500 Physicists, 12 years of work, 1.5 Billion? I'm outraged! The biggest boondoggle in the history of the ISS could have paid for an extra week of war in Iraq!

    2. 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
  13. Why are the gyros failing? by ChrisMaple · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It's been more than 20 years since I was in the inertial navigation business, but my recollection is that there should be no significant wearout mechanism for gyros. Mechanical gyros use air bearings (or possibly magnetic bearings): no contact, no wear. I suppose if they're using laser gyros they'll fail eventually due to problems with impurities or thermal stresses or something.

    Are the control electronics associated with the gyros failing? What gyro technology are they using?

    --
    Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
  14. Invoice by QuickFox · · Score: 3, Funny

    I bet like all repairmen they'll charge ridiculously large travel expenses.

    --
    Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
  15. Still alive! by kagaku · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm doing science and I'm still alive.
    I feel fantastic and I'm still alive.
    While you're dying I'll be still alive.
    And when you're dead I will be still alive.

    Still alive.

    --
    everyday is another shooter.