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Upgraded Hubble To Be 90 Times As Powerful

Posted by kdawson on from the new-glasses-and-oh-here's-your-binoculars dept.

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.

2 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Was Hubble worth it? by jo42 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Now just imagine what all of the several hundreds of billions of dollars pissed away in Iraq could have of done. The Hubble has cost a mere month or two of Iraq wastage.

  2. Re:Was Hubble worth it? by SL+Baur · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If you want to consider real money, consider the > 450 billion dollars spent over the last 5 years on the Iraq war, or the 450 Billion dollar Defense budget spent every year which doesn't even include war operations. Pictures of faraway things - $0.003/day
    Dead Iraqi women and children every day - Priceless