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.

Comments

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[patio11]

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I swear, I burn more karma on NASA than any other reason. And given that I voted for Dubya twice, am browsing in IE7 right now, *and* run Vista at home, that is really saying something.

I don't agree that pointing to the billions being wasted elsewhere is necessarily more effective. You know what will the defenders of those projects will say? "Don't look at at my hobbyhorse, look over there at NASA, they're practically setting billions afire." And you're both right, but if I take you at face value, then the budget just continues to balloon outwards. Similarly, keeping the Hubble alive because we've already sunk billions is just trying to justify sunk costs despite the fact that we aren't getting a positive marginal return on our investments. The hole just keeps getting deeper, because we won't stop digging.