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Upgraded Hubble To Be 90 Times As Powerful
The feed brings us a New Scientist review of the repairs and new instruments that astronauts will bring to the Hubble Space Telescope next August (unless the launch is delayed). The resulting instrument will be 90 times as powerful as Hubble was designed to be when launched, and 60% more capable than it was after its flawed optics were repaired in 1993. If the astronauts pull it off — and the mission is no slam-dunk — the space telescope should be able to image galaxies back to 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Last I heard, it was being dumped. Anyone want to give some info on when they changed their mind re. the hubble's fate?
does it run SETI@Home?
THL phish sticks
I downloaded some pic's from the Hubble/Nasa sights the other day and I can't wait to see what this updated baby can pull off...
Puuurdyyy
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
ACS is partially functional and still able to conduct science observations, a circuit board repair will make it fully functional. Also the mirror was never fixed, the science instruments correct for the defect. Other then that the article appears correct.
>> 400 million years after the Big Bang
That's about how long it feels like it's been since my last big bang.
I am having doubts as to whether Hubble was worth it. My gut feeling tells me that the monies used in the entire Hubble project would have changed lots of American lives in a big positive way. What have we got out of it that is worth all those billions spent so far? Can somebody convince me?
Can it or can it not fry people like ants under a magnifying glass.
That's what we want to know.
Most people think the magnification of a telescope is the most important number, whereas astronomers are typically more interested in the light-gathering power, as measured by the aperture. What's really being increased by a factor of 90 is neither the magnification nor the sensitivity, it's apparently the product of the sensitivity and the area of the field of view. The argument seems to be that this is an important figure of merit if you're doing a survey of faint objects, such as very distant galaxies.
Find free books.
I knew that the Images where artificially colored, but I did not realise it was altered that much. It is a bit of a let down, but still, I think it is impressive.
Close to where we stay is an observatory, I plan on going there on the 30th to have a look at the Mars Impact, if that will happen at all btw., and I hope to get a "real" look at some of the gems in the sky...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
You, insensitive clod!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The summary is a bit misleading about the 60%.
FTA: "HST will be about 60% more powerful than it was right after the third servicing mission, before ACS and STIS failed."
The 1993 servicing mission generally restored the designed capabilities of the Hubble, the so-called "factor of 90" that the article mentions. Major new improvements and capabilities came with each servicing mission, culminating in the March 2002 servicing mission that installed the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
The upcoming installation of the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) will improve the combined sensitivity and field of view by 60% over the Hubble as it was after March 2002 (and before ACS died).
To be fair... by the same metric, modern ground-based telescopes with large format CCD and infrared arrays are on the order of 100 times more powerful than they were in 1990 as well. In the near infrared, the gains are closer to a factor of 1000!
>>
Really it's one of the most cost effective missions that NASA can do from a science per dollar perspective
>>
The relevent question, though, is whether its one of the most cost effective things *we* can do from a science-per-dollar perspective. And it's not. $1.5 billion to launch. $350 million a year to keep operational. And for what? Pretty pictures of far away balls of gas and, maybe, if we're lucky, a hint of a large rock orbiting the balls of gas.
Let's bust out the government's $135 billion yearly R&D budget. What could we do with an extra $350 million? Well, let me present you with a variety of options. We could double our R&D spending on malaria and TB, working to save several hundred thousand children a year who die from one of the two. Maybe they're not as photogenic as stars many light years away, though. OK, forget the kids.
We could spend the $350 million paying for open source software to be developed. That would pay for, conservatively, hundreds of projects, or a few flagships with the impact of Apache or Firefox. One of them could even develop stunning vistas from distant galaxies, since apparently people think that is an important use of the taxpayer's dollars.
I'm personally skeptical about solar power but, hey, for $350 million you could fund about a dozen projects a year looking into both radical new materials to use and iterations on the existing stuff, trying to make it cost-competitive with cheap coal.
If exploring new frontiers makes you misty, you could just about double our oceanographic research budget with a cool $350 million. We've pissed away billions trying to get a closer look at a dead environment which is terribly hostile to human life and which might include a few drops of water here and there. Instead, for a few million we could do in-depth study of unique organisms who robust, exciting environment and which most certainly includes water. And if you're the "well we've got to find a way off this rock!" Slashdot contingent who has read one too many sci-fi novels, your $350 billion would also count against improving our ability to survive in hostile environments.
Speaking of ecosystems, want to see if an off-world colony is EVER going to be viable? For $350 million you could restart the BioDome project. If you can solve that issue here, you can always worry about launch vehicles later, but if you can't, then all space research in the world won't get you what you want.
Yeah yeah, I know, I know -- "Space isn't the biggest waste of money in the budget!" I'm sure it isn't, but being less-than-maximally-wasteful is not a ringing endorsement of your favorite program.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The Earth is only 6,000 years old. Mike Huckabee wouldn't lie to me.
But the i486 processors remain !! I'ld have pull the boards and put in a Pentium w/MMX Tecnology (TM) at least !! Just think: U AND V pipes !! MMX !! The things you can do with those !!
Let me guess: the next mission after this one will upgrade the telescope to be able to see up to 300 million years before the Big Bang! Even better, it has the same chance of succeeding on budget and schedule as the mission the article describes!
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
So actually it's going to be only 1.6 times better than before, because before the first big repair to improve the optics the thing was mostly unusable. Am I right?
-- Cheers!
(and $350 million in operating costs per year), I'm betting you I could have developed that technology without having had to blast anything into orbit. This is the problem with all of the "NASA once had a worthwhile spinoff, therefore it is worthwhile" -- just fund the spinoffs directly and you could do it for a thousandth the price.
I like Tang as much as the next guy, but you don't ever need to blast someone into orbit to produce Tang.
What, besides launching satellites (which, thankfully, can be done without public funding), has NASA ever produced which provides its benefit *because* it is not on earth, not *in spite* of it not being on earth?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The Hubble no more gave us CCD's than the Apollo program gave us Tang...
There was a definite need for CCD imaging whether or not the Hobbled was built. If there was a $9.35 billion value for live imaging of breast tumors then it would have been researched and developed regardless, and more efficiently than by putting up a huge mirror into space. It's not like no one thought of the technology besides space telescope supporters
Mind you, I'm not necessarily knocking the Rubble telescope - that I leave for the astronomers to argue - but let's not kid ourselves with science spinoffs and hidden efficiencies.
I think you mean blue shift.
Or, to put it the other way, is this improvement actually 60% (still a lot!) over current situation, and the "90 times as powerful" is basically just bullshit hype?
I came in here to say almost exactly what the parent post said - If you had taken all the Hubble money and rather spent it on some social program it would come down to basically $1 per US citizen per year over the last 20 years.
Money spent on pure science is usually a good investment because the returns are cumulative. The new knowledge that we gain can potentially benefit the human race in all perpetuity.
E.g. Of the immense amount of technology that gives you the ability to post here in Slashdot large portions was funded by public money. Yes, you could rather have used that money to feed a few hungry people, but I would argue that the human race as a whole would be worse off for it.
siener's youtube channel
Will the Hubble Space Telescope once again become the most important scientific tool for space exploration? Why yes, but, the real question is... will it blend?
That much money could have funded a lot of basic research and training in labs throughout the US had it been given to NIH or NSF which seems to me a better way to spend the money.
But, if as is probably the case, that the money was only available to science in the form of the Hubble due to defense tie-ins, NASA PR, or some other political factors, then I agree that the money was better spent than being sunk into corporate welfare programs...
Hubble is definately one of the great science success stories of the past decades. Remember it would have been a complete disaster if the initial mirror errors discovered just after it was placed in orbit could not have been corrected. And also now (again) thanks to the shuttle upgrades it will give much more crucial science. I worry a bit with this about the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be much further from earth (Sun-Earth Lagrange point, if I am not mistaken). Anybody know what NASA's longterm plan for JWST upgrades is (probably somewhere around 2015-2025)? Hope for a fail-safe design? Robotic missions?
How much more would be required to see planets outside our solar system?
I had no idea that the Hubble program was so cheap at $6.5B.
So can we now point it to the moon and take pictures of the Apollo mission artifacts (supposedly) left on its surface?
What would be really cool for the JWST would be to launch it into orbit and test it for awhile. Then if it tests out ok, boost it to it's new solar orbit. That's similar to what they did for Apollo missions, but for a Telescope it may be too expensive.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
governments subsidies of anything else, and on a personal level for second computers, second cars, Nikes and game consoles. Science and technology give you otherwise uncharted options. To paraphrase Lewis Black, we can now put a closet full of CDs on an iPod, we should ALSO be able to figure out how to get the sunlight that cooks our rooftops to cook our meals.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
None whatsoever. It's going to be at the L1 Lagrange point; this means that repair missions are not really possible. This was an easy way for NASA administrators to avoid the long-term budgetary overhead incurred by upkeep. (That said, there's also a good science justification for putting the telescope at L1).
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
He also thought Canada's National Igloo was melting...
Its not really a lie when you are too stupid and just believe anything anyone tells you.
Without them, Hubble would have failed to capture public interest and consequently would have been lobbed into the atmosphere the first time they considered its fate. So, frankly, it is all about the "bloody pictures" because the math only interests a small minority.
Most people don't care how or why a roses exist, it is enough that they are beautiful and fragrant and inspiring.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Hubble was not a waste of money, but if NASA decides repair it and doesn't delivers the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/01/AR2007120100760.html,you'll have a 1.5 Billion paperweight and 500 mad physicists.
What does the scouter say about the new resolution? It's over 9000%!
The feed brings us a New Scientist review of the repairs and new instruments that astronauts will bring to the Hubble Space Telescope next August (unless the launch is delayed).
Should read:
The feed brings us a New Scientist review of the repairs and new instruments that astronauts will take to the Hubble Space Telescope next August (unless the launch is delayed).
How can they bring it if they're not there yet?
We're comparing 1993 percentages! Add inflation, ~1% per year, so it is really an extra 15% better on top of the 60%!
It'll actually be at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point. But your point still stands; a repair/servicing mission would be very difficult and prohibitively expensive.
You know what? Go fuck yourself. I can't stand people who get up on their pedestal and say some research or project is a waste of money. NO PURE SCIENCE IS A WASTE OF MONEY. If it's adding to the Sum of Human Knowledge, then it's worth it. Something doesn't have to provide direct or immediate tangible benefits to be worthwhile. And if it results in a little more understanding than we had previously, I say well done.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
If NASA holds firm to ending the shuttle era and space station construction by 2010, there is no way in hell NASA can do 13 more missions by 2010. I hope the next president in her wisdom will grant NASA the leeway to finish its shuttle tasks. Got to decide soon, because shuttle refurbishing orders take up to two years to fullfill.
JWST is supposed to be "disposable." NASA decided early on that to make it serviceable like the Hubble, especially with the desired orbit being so far from earth, would add to much cost and complexity. It's already far more complex and expensive than the Hubble, with the cost having ballooned to $4.5 billion and likely to increase further in the 5 years remaining until launch. Of course, some of that is the driven by the neccessity of making it especially robust, since you don't get any chances to screw this one up.
All of that said, NASA has been considering developing a Constellation program mission to the Lagrange points. In this scenario, an Orion CEV would be launched aboard either a yet-to-be-developed Ares IV, or else an Ares 1 with a separate Ares 1 launching an Earth departure stage to give it the delta-v necessary to reach the Lagrange points. This could potentially be used to perform emergency repairs on satellites in those positions or to study a trojan asteroid. Unfortunately, Orion won't be as effective of a work platform as the shuttle, but the shuttle also can't be adapted to travel so far from earth.
Or that money could have changed lots of Iraqi lives in a big, ambiguously bad way. Given the track record of the people who've been spending the most money, I'm perfectly happy that the funds went to Hubble.
/universe/ around us. Considering the likely alternate uses of that cash, I'd say it's as good an expenditure as any. Or hey, we could just take the entire expenditure of the hubble project thus far and fund like 2 months of the military action in Iraq.
What we get from all this is a better understanding of the
The Slashdot crowd, circa 1998: We can't get laid 'cause we're all single.
The Slashdot crowd, circa 2008: We can't get laid 'cause we're all married.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Isn't anyone monitoring these posts? Did you get sucked into reading this because of the "90 times" number in the headline. This repair will NOT generate a 90 times improvement. It will improve the Hubble by 60% over its previous condition. That is the only number relevant to the new science made possible by this repair. The 90 times number is not related to this repair. Most of that 90 times came from the first repair mission that repaired the original design flaw in the mirror and basically got it back close to the original spec. But "90 times" sucked you in didn't it? This is the kind of dishonest headlining that gives honest journalists a bad name.
All of this looking into deep space and distant past is fine and all but I am much more interested in looking at stars here in the Milky Way to find out more about their planets. The reasons for this are that we will colonize space, and we need to figure out which star systems are worth sending probes to in search of terraformable planets. It will take a very long time for these probes to arrive, and almost as long for a colonization ship to arrive and start the terraformation. We need to launch these probes now, and continue to work on technologies which make interstellar travel and terraformation possible while these probes are on their long journeys. Can Hubble make the observations we need?
Honest question. What direction do you point this thing if you want to see back to the big bang? If there was a big bang, then the universe must have a center, right? So do we know where the center is?
Could these upgrades help to prove if it never happened and that the universe is actually much older than it is currently believed to be?
60% more capable? What's the metric unit of capability measurement? How many flights of stairs you can climb?
(Actually, in the article, it said "60% more powerful", so why did the submitter change it to "capable"?)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Furthermore, why does everyone always assume that every project undertaken by the nation must have a short term return on investment? Does everything that you personally spend money on yield a cash return? How much money has that big plasma or DLP TV monitor made for you? Did the last CD/DVD/book/whatnot that you bought generate a net profit for you? Why should the nation's expenditures be any different?
If NASA gives up on the Ares I/V pair and begins to pursue something reasonable, like the Direct architecture, they will have boosters capable of sending a CEV along with cargo and a departure stage to L2 without having to wait decades (or forever) for Ares V to be built.
While there is no realistic way for NASA to service the JWST with current and planned rockets, it does seem like the designers of the JWST are preparing it with the hopes that NASA changes its attitude with regards to boosters and builds something that can affordably reach L2. With Ares, it will be as expensive as a full blown moon mission.