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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?
>> 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?
You know, almost all of those astronomical images are artificially colored and enhanced to maximize their ascetic appeal. Have a look at some of the various images of the cat's eye nebula to see. A quick Google turns up 5 different colorings:
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Cats_Eye_Nebula.jpg
http://www.uni-sw.gwdg.de/~panders/Images/AstroImages/03_CatEyeNebula.jpg
http://www.spacetoday.org/images/Hubble/HubbleBeauty/CatsEyeNebulaNASA.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/NGC6543.jpg
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Cats_Eye_Nebula_2.jpg
The interpretation of the horsehead nebula is at least consistent (most of the time), but there is still plenty of artistic license being taken.
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/52238main_MM_image_feature_89_jw4.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/45506main_MM_Image_Feature_73_rs4.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/scott_metz/alternity/graphics/horsehead_nebula.jpg
http://www.sidewalk-astronomy-club.com/img/horsehead-nebula.jpg
http://www.fourthdimensionastroimaging.com/sitebuilder/images/horsehead-712x571.jpg
I was sort of disappointed when I found that out...
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.
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The images have to be artificially colored because more often than not the images are put together from images outside the visible wavelength. None of those images would be interesting to humans in the original wavelengths.
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Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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!
It does have a 486 on board so if you can get the Flight Software guys to add it in, it could.
Stop the use of force!
The Earth is only 6,000 years old. Mike Huckabee wouldn't lie to me.
It's not bloody pictures! It's seeing proof that we have our maths right.
The problem is that for the cost of a single shuttle maintenance mission to Hubble you could build and launch a new telescope.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
From the site: Taking color pictures with the Hubble Space Telescope is much more complex than taking color pictures with a traditional camera. For one thing, Hubble doesn't use color film -- in fact, it doesn't use film at all. Rather, its cameras record light from the universe with special electronic detectors. These detectors produce images of the cosmos not in color, but in shades of black and white.
Finished color images are actually combinations of two or more black-and-white exposures to which color has been added during image processing.
The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye
i read about it in a blog once
The coloration of such images is thought of as being as much the artistic expression of the astronomer in question as it is clarification of the image.
The thing is, without coloration, we wouldn't be able to see the various structures. Astronomers probably would, being trained, but not us normal folk. Besides, who wants to look at dull greyscale when you can spice it up with some color? The aim of making the image easier to interpret is achieved, and it looks pretty too.
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!
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
And if that money had been spent in the private sector, mamograms would be patented by Pfizer, and cost 5 times as much as the old method.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
More likely, the money would have been spent by NIH to develop the technology, and then have it patented by Pfizer, and cost 5 times as much as the old method.
They are very interesting, just not visible.
My favorite part of all of this is that your argument basically consists of an unsupported claim that hubble accomplishes nothing more than taking pretty pictures, followed by what is essentially an exploration of the opportunity cost of funding hubble's repairs. Exactly what kind of argument is that? Of course $350 million could be well spent on other areas of research, that's not an argument against the repairs, that's the inherent nature of the decision. By choosing A, you necessarily lose out on options B, C, D, etc. ...and?
What you have not done, at all, in either of your posts here is offer a single reason that hubble is undeserving of these funds. Clearly, you think hubble is a wast of money. Clearly its a lot of money and other areas of research could benefit from getting it instead.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
What could we do with an extra $350 million?
We could finance about 7 hours of the war in Iraq?
You just got troll'd!
Why yes, but, the real question is... will it blend?
2007 just called, they want their viral marketing Internet meme back.
You just got troll'd!
"The problem is that for the cost of a single shuttle maintenance mission to Hubble you could build and launch a new telescope."
That may be true but there also may be benefits in learning to repair what we have, that go beyond merely the "launch and trash" philosophy, i.e. when resources are limited. What kinds of new technologies will be spawned to learn how to repair existing stuff in space and what will be learned I think is just as valuable since sooner or later we will have to learn whether others want it or not.
interesting : from http://www.worldspaceflight.com/america/shuttles/overview.htm i get $500m. does that seem right? so how much do folk think a new hubble would cost to design, build, launch?
I'm sure Max Planck would be quite amazed at what we've gotten done using the concept of quantum, even though it seemed to be little more than a mathematical trick when he first thought of it.
Even if you look at NASA as a pork barrel tool that feed the aerospace industry, it's a lot better to feed them thru NASA than it is to feed them through the military.
In the end, less people get hurt, less people get really pissed of and we end up with better pictures.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Now THAT is a colossal waste of money. Why would anyone give money to a bunch of teenagers when they are stupid enough to develop and release software for free? Besides. who gets to decide what is useful to develop and what isn't? What's useful for one may be a complete waste of time to someone else.
Software development shouldn't be a government welfare project - it has to be driven commercially.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Not really, even the most pessimistic calculations put the cost of a manned mission at well under $2B whereas the most optimistic predictions for the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) put it at $4.5B with typical overruns that puts it closer to $6B and it's not even planned to launch until 2013.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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).
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About $4.5 Billion. It's much cheaper to repair and upgrade than to replace.
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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.
Yeah, totally. Oh wait, the DOD funded the development of the Internet, advanced wireless communications, GPS, tons of medical advances, and numerous other projects that you probably benefit from. It's not all death and destruction you know. Personally, I'm happier to see the advancements in medical treatment than I am the pretty pictures.
True, but how about some good old black&white then when the original color isn't know?
Then you'd have to look at three times as many pictures to get the same amount of information, and none of them would be as pleasing to the human eye.
The convention that NASA seems to use is that they map the lowest-frequency channel to red, the middle to green, and the highest to blue. That's about as consistent as you can get when dealing with multispectral imagery.
If you really want black and white, just use the GIMP or Photoshop to extract one of the colour channels and save it as a greyscale image.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman