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