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Hubble Space Telescope Will Last Through the Mid-2020s, Report Says (space.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Despite recent issues with one of its instruments, the Hubble Space Telescope is expected to last at least another five years. A new report suggests that the iconic spacecraft has a strong chance of enduring through the mid-2020s. [...] One reason the spacecraft has lasted so long is that astronauts have provided aid. Servicing missions continued to update the telescope until 2009, when the space shuttle was retired. The final update to Hubble included the installation of two brand-new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and WFC3. The astronauts on Servicing Mission 4 also performed on-site repairs for the telescope's two other instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), both of which had stopped working. The astronauts additionally replaced Hubble's 18-year-old batteries with new ones; installed six new gyroscopes, whose job is turning the telescope; and added a brand-new Fine Guidance System to point the instrument. Astronauts also covered Hubble's equipment bays with insulating panels and installed a device that will help to guide the observatory down when its mission comes to an end.
The longevity or Hubble is still more proof that our machines take to space as a natural medium, with missions routinely serving a multiple of their expected lifetimes. On the other hand, Hubble got a large part of its extended lifetime from manned servicing. In fact if it had not been for manned missions, Hubble would have returned no data at all.
will be to land on Trump like that house in The Wizard of Oz, so we won't have to endure another 4 years of his idiocy.
the James Webb Space Telescope, (JWST) is currently scheduled for March 2021. It was designed as the successor to the Hubble , and originally scheduled for launch in June 2018.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel...
How interesting, a government web site that's still working.
By all accounts, the Hubble Space Telescope should retire to a museum such as the Smithsonian but instead it will be burned up during re-entry like a piece of space garbage. So sad :-(
Says who? Is that official? De-orbiting it will need a mission sent. Might as well boost it to a higher long-term orbit instead.
One day, somebody will offer to bring it back. Would be a lot of prestige for the BFR, or whoever succeeds in building a suitable vehicle.
(The Shuttle would have been capable of returning the 11 tons to Earth.)
"De-orbiting" costs much less fuel and is a much longer term solution. Reducing its orbital speed even slightly will bring it into more contact with Earth's atmosphere, which will continue to slow its speed until it spirals down: this is the normal fate of every object in LEO, or low earth orbit. The thing is 40 feet long and weighs 22 tons. I find myself wishing it could be salvaged for posterity, like many NASA missions it has vastly exceeded its expected work life and provided unique insights into the nature of the universe.
Getting it out of the way early?
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Hopefully the BFR works; if Ol'Musky gets it flying for anywhere near the projected cost, it would have little issue with recovering Hubble and bringing it down. And for that matter, the BFR would also be capable of hauling up much larger replacement telescopes.
installed a device that will help to guide the observatory down when its mission comes to an end.
i.e. one of the astronauts lost his watch inside the casing.
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One of the upgrades included space-hardened 80486s, replacing the original 80386s.
Hubble was designed around the Space Shuttle; if that was still available Hubble could have been retrieved.
Now that we're nearly a decade past the last shuttle launch, it makes sense to take stock in what the post-shuttle space missions have been like. It seems in a lot of ways we lost a lot of capabilities of near-Earth orbits and have to entirely rely on the ISS for experiments. Satellite and equipment repairs on things like Hubble are now out of our capability and I wonder what we've intangibly lost in terms of science and innovation that went into the shuttle's design and upkeep. I'm probably just being nostalgic for the shuttle since I grew up with it as a constant presence, but I feel like we've taken a step back having to rely on the Russians to launch human missions in the short-term and going back to capsules that are nothing more than taxis rather than being a platform for experiments and equipment launches/repairs.
JWST isn't a true "replacement" for Hubble.
Tthere are a few things JWST can do that Hubble can't, but there are a LOT of things Hubble can do that JWST can't. It's more of a step sideways than a step forward.
As an augment to Hubble, it has the potential to be a fantastic resources. As an outright replacement, it kind of sucks.
Making matters worse, JWST's expected service life is shockingly short, and unlike Hubble, NASA appears to really *mean* it when it says it plans to deorbit JWST on schedule (to avoid leaving spacejunk cluttering a Lagrange point). So it's ENTIRELY conceivable that if Hubble gets deorbited with JWST as an alleged "replacement", we'll end up with no comparable space telescopes AT ALL a couple of years later.
The best thing we can do with Hubble right now is to get maximum use from it, then do our best to keep it cheaply re-boosted until such time as we have the ability to do a proper servicing mission on it (replacing its electronics and mechanically-failing parts, but taking advantage of the huge spaceframe and lens that we realistically have no way to replace anytime within the next 15-25 years).
For somewhat of an analogy, imagine that your family runs a tour service on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean & has a big, London-style double-decker bus that's iconic and wildly popular with tourists. Your grandfather bought it 30 years ago when it was shiny & new, and had it transported to the island in a semi-custom airplane that no longer exists (assume that for some reason, boats can't reach the island... maybe it's surrounded by jagged reefs that would be suicidal to attempt navigating by boat). Today, that old bus is kind of a hot mess... it needs a new engine, the seats are tattered, and it needs a good paint job. A brand new bus would cost less than refurbishing the old one, except for one problem... there's nobody who's CAPABLE of transporting an entire new bus to your island because it's too big to fit into any of today's smaller, cheaper, safer, and more fuel-efficient (but sadly, smaller) cargo planes, so you have to make do with packing replacement parts onto multiple air cargo planes and flying them in if you want to continue having a working double-decker bus on that island.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it makes the point... Hubble has parts that simply CAN'T be replaced anytime soon. If we throw them away by deorbiting it, the capabilities they represent will be gone "forever" (at least, the foreseeable future, quite probably the remainder of our own lives). A limited robotic servicing mission by SpaceX that does nothing but boost Hubble into a higher orbit to buy us another 10-15 years to decide what to do with it would be an extremely prudent investment, because the alternative would be the destruction of a valuable asset that literally can't be replaced at any cost within the next few years.
On a relatively cheap rocket, one way. And hopefully the Web has been designed so that it can be serviced by a robot, with easy to undo bolts etc.
Would be even cheaper. And the Chinese don't worry about space junk.