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Hubble Stops Sending Data, Mission On Hold
mknewman writes to tell us that NASA is no longer receiving data from the Hubble Space Telescope, which could possibly delay the shuttle launch planned just two weeks from now. There is a backup system installed which may be used instead of training the astronauts on the installation of the new component, but that would itself leave no fallback option. "NASA is reviewing whether the mission should be delayed a couple of months so that plans can be made to send up a replacement part for the failed component, said NASA spokesman Michael Curie. It would take time to test and qualify the old replacement part and train the astronauts to install it in the telescope, Curie said. NASA also would have to work out new mission details for the astronauts who have trained for two years to carry out five Hubble repair spacewalks."
Unfortunately, Congress dropping 700 Billion on Wall Street might end up cutting into NASA's budget, along with several other programs.
My understanding was that Hubble had a life expectancy of 20 years.
From where do you understand this?
Design Life: Designed for a 15 year life with on-orbit servicing. http://www.aerospaceguide.net/hubblespacetelescope.html
And naturally things would be going better if on-orbit servicing was still considered a regular option.
Press conference at 6pm EDT, more info then. Bill Harwood at CBS Spaceplace usually does good writeups, as does Chris Bergin at nasaspaceflight.com , so look over there tonight.
One simple rule for its versus it's
HST was scheduled to fly in Oct '86 when Challenger blew up. It sat in a clean room, powered up and purged with nitrogen, for 3-4 years before flight. The wait wasn't so kind to Galileo, her high gain antenna wouldn't unfurl after all that time and there would be no possible servicing mission.
Wow, there must have been a double helping of crack with the mod points today. "Offtopic" certainly, but "flamebait" does *not* mean "I disagree". Flamebait looks like this, you foul-smelling pigfuckers of dubious ancestry.
As a comparison the entire Apollo program cost about 135 Billion (in 2005 Dollars).
(polite correction)...
Saying "Interferometry can do better" makes no sense... similar to saying "RISC can do better" for you computer geeks. It's basically jargon + the phrase can do better. Meaningless without a problem statement and a lot of background info.
In reality, very few optical telescopes can operate in an interferometric mode, and there's a specific class of problems where it's actually useful. Furthermore, I think it would hard to define "better" in this context. FYI there are also preliminary plans out there for formation-flying interferometric space telescopes (none are currently on the map for real funding AFAIK).
In terms of absolute resolution over a small field with just a single telescope (non-interferometric), ground-based Adaptive Optics *can* do better (under certain conditions)... in the near future, they will be able to do significantly better than the Hubble over a much larger range of conditions... -But- there are still PLENTY of things that ONLY a space telescope can do, a buttload of things it does "better", and tons of interesting science that remains to be done.
Duct tape by any other name, is still so very sweet. As long as you aren't using it on ducts. Which ironicly, it's completely inappropriate for.