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NASA Approves Five More Years For Hubble Space Telescope (newscientist.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: NASA has announced plans to extend operations of the famous space telescope for another five years, through to June 2021. That means it will still be on the job when its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launches in 2018, giving astronomers a dual view of the universe. "Hubble is expected to continue to provide valuable data into the 2020s, securing its place in history as an outstanding general-purpose observatory in areas ranging from our solar system to the distant universe," said a NASA statement. Squeezing more life out of Hubble means it will overlap with NASA's next big telescope, JWST when it launches in 2018. While Hubble sees the cosmos in visible and ultraviolet light, JWST operates in the infrared. The various wavelengths can reveal different aspects of stars and galaxies, so using the scopes in tandem will enable astronomers to study the heavens in even greater detail.
Why not use it until it's completely broken?
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
[1]: http://www.space.com/20799-hubble-space-telescope-23-years.html/
Why not use it until it's completely broken?
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
If the U.S. does not intend to keep it flying, then at some point we should really consider giving it away to another country, such as Dubai, which has expressed an interest in having a space program, so long as the thing has operational life left in it.
I suspect at some point in the near future, SpaceX will have the capability of performing a service mission to recharge the expendables, and update an instrument package or two. An inability to do that, for lack of a shuttle, is one of the primary driving factors in a shutdown/deorbit decision.
Hell, give it to Alphabet! They're interested in staring at nearby rocks they might want to mine, and can easily afford to operate the thing, an many of the instrument packages you'd use to look for rocks are good for another 40+ years.
View all the light and decode it later.
It's really difficult to make all the light reflect & refract usefully thru a common optical chain. IR mirrors and lenses are quite different from visible light optics, and quite different again from UV & X-ray optics. The IR mirror in Webb likely has absorption lines in the visible spectrum that would "eat" the signal before it made it to the collector.
Agh, what does that even mean? "View all the light"? Do you have any idea how things work? For example mirrors. There doesn't exist a material that can reflect all wavelengths of the EM spectrum. You are familiar with the common "silvery" mirrors right? While we can make them good at reflecting the visible spectrum (that's why there are is no color tinge in their view), the farther you go into IR territory the worse they get. If you are interested in the IR you can optimize a mirror for IR reflectivity, but at the same time you start losing at the shorter visible wavelengths. Have you noticed that the James Webb telescope mirrors are gold? The reason is they don't reflect blue! /. smart-asses...
So it is not a matter of sensors but of material limitations, you have to optimize your optical instrument for the EM range that interests you and it will suck outside of this range, so there is no point in adding sensors to record crap.
That's why engineers and scientists design these things instead of
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The Moon Landing. Great pictures.
Pioneer 10. Great pictures.
The Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. Great pictures.
Hubble. Great pictures.
But you forgot Vger. Great picture.
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