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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.
>> 400 million years after the Big Bang
That's about how long it feels like it's been since my last big bang.
When the new director took over one of his first acts was to reinstate the Hubble upgrade. Really it's one of the most cost effective missions that NASA can do from a science per dollar perspective and one of the few ones that needs the shuttle before it's decommissioned.
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The fundamental problem with your statement is that you assume that the $$$ would otherwise have been used to change lives in a big positive way.
Put very simply, through science, we gain an understanding of the world, and universe around us, how it operates and how we can interact more effectively with it.
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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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You've been modded flamebait by someone, but it's a legitimate question that many people have when looking at instruments designed for pure science and discovery. There are quite a few really good arguments about why the Hubble should be around which are based on the science mission, but I'll give you an example of positive spinoffs that affect our daily lives. Google will give you many more.
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"NASA's TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER PROGRAM FOR TEE EARLY DETECTION OF BREAST CANCER", available at ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel4/5216/14105/00646457.pdf?tp=&isnumber=&arnumber=646457
One NASA-driven development has already found its way into clinical use as part of the LORAD; stereotactic needle
biopsy system. The charge-coupled device (CCD) camera used in this system was originally designed and built for use
in the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, and provides a high-resolution, high-contrast image in real time
to guide a physician in the accurate collection of a biopsy sample from suspicious imaged breast lesions. The Hubble
CCD, coupled with a high-speed phosphor screen, gives greatly increased sensitivity, contrast and resolution over
previous methods, The result is a less traumatic, lower cost ($800 vs. $2,500 typically for surgical biopsy), non-surgical biopsy procedure for the more than 500,000 American women who undergo breast biopsies each year.
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Here, Hubble directly increased the ability for us to find cancers. When you look at a dollar amount, (2500-800)*500000 gives us $0.85 billion per year. Note that this article was published in 1996; today, mammograms and biopsies are much more common. To keep things simple, if we assume a constant number of patients, the Hubble CCD alone has directly resulted in cost savings of $9.35 billion (let alone lives saved). Also note that the cost of scalpel biopsies is mostly based on labor, and so would not have dropped much beyond the $2500 level; CCD's have become very inexpensive (relative to costs in 1996) and so the savings would actually be significantly larger than calculated here.
Anyone know the true cost of a non-surgical biopsy today?
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Wikipedia says the cumulative cost of the Hubble program has been 6.5 billion dollars. The population of the United States is approximately 300 million people. That means that the Hubble over its entire lifespan cost every man, woman and child in the United States $21.67 each. So no, all the monies spent on it would not have changed lots of American lives in a big positive way. Considering that all that money was paid over the course of the last 18 years, that means each person paid the equivalent of a little over a dollar per year for the wonderful pictures and discoveries it made. So, are the secrets of the universe, or even just pretty pictures worth a third of a cent per day? I think so. 6.5 billion dollars in the hands of one person is a lot of money. 6.5 billion dollars spread across 300 million people over 20 years is practically nothing. 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.
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'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.
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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