What would happen is we would get really clear images of relatively close bright objects, and never see what Hubble can see.
Ground based telescopes cannot take images such as Hubble Ultra Deep Field. These images helped prove the age of the universe, find dark matter and look back to almost when the universe was created.
Because now that they know more, they know it is too dangerous.
For the Apollo flights, it was just sheer dumb luck that no solar flare occurred while they were outside the protection of the Earths magnetosphere. If it had the crew would have been killed instantly. Ignorance really was bliss in that case.
No protection from radiation is probably the primary reason why we can't go to Mars yet.
They already demonstrated robotic replacement of gyros on the ground with a mockup of Hubble and the rescue robot testbed, so no its not that hard for a robot.
Of course they could do it for less, much less. However NASA would never allow it.
Sending up an inconsequential communications satellite for cheap is one thing, but quite another for a $1 Billion irreplaceable telescope. That means higher reliability, which means higher cost .
Thanks for responding. Adaptive optics are amazing and a great advancement in ground based telescopes. And I have no doubt that if Hubble tried to take a image of what one of these newer scopes can see, and you compared the resulting images , that Hubble would probably lose.
Why then do I say that these scopes cant take the pictures that Hubble can? For the simple fact that the Earths' atmosphere is opaque to most radiation that is interesting to astronomy. Also Hubble can see objects in the visible spectrum that are too faint for ground based telescopes to see.
Earth based telescopes can only view the visible spectrum, and some radio (less than 1% of radio waves reach the Earths surface). Since the visible spectrum is only a very small part of what is interesting to look at, ground based telescopes are inherently limited.
For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, not only can ground based telescopes not stay on the same spot that long, but the part of the images were taken in infrared, again unviewable from the ground. And for those that think Hubble is old, these images were taken with the new camera installed in 2002. These images were impossible for the cameras that used to be on Hubble, and is still impossible for any other telescope in the world.
Check http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/07/text/ for more information.
Not sure where you get the impression that the gyros were not 'pluggable'.
All six gyros were replaced during the 1999 shuttle mission to upgrade the Hubble, and the proposed repair robot is intended to replace them all yet again. (This has been successfully robotically demonstrated on the ground too by the way.)
Gyros are a limited lifetime item. If you were to replace Hubble with another telescope as some suggest, it would still have the exact same gyro problem.
Since Hubble is upgradeable, and has been four times now, it is essentially a new telescope. It is really only the frame and some of the electronics that are old.
Hubble's capabilities now are vastly superior to what they were say 5-7 years ago.
Current ground-based scopes can produce better images than hubble did. This wasn't true in the early 90s, but it's true now.
This is a common misconception and completely untrue. It is impossible for ground based telescopes (ANY ground based telescope) to take images that Hubble can. Look at the Hubble Deep field images. These can only be taken from an orbiting observatory.
Most of the items on Hubble are designed to be replaceable in orbit, which is why a robot is able to be designed to replace exactly the things you identify.
Interestingly, James Webb is NOT serviceable because of its orbit.
You're dreaming if you think you can launch a Hubble sized object for $150 million.
Given the mass of Hubble, the launch vehicle design and construction, and the fault tolerance that would have to be adhered to, that launch would more likely be $250 to $500 million.
Also, do you have a reference for your claim that Spitzer uses AO? I couldn't find a single mention of that fact, anywhere. In fact, I can't find a mention of *any* spaceborne imaging system that uses AO.
You can't find any because they don't exist, the poster you quoted is just making shit up.
No spacecraft uses AO because there is no need. Compensation of thermal effects is done by proper mechanical engineering design, not in the optics.
Can't see what this would possibly give over Google or other great search engines. What possible benefit could Microsoft give to this that is not already there? Why bother reinventing the wheel, except for the purpose of desktop domination?
Actually it is a good reason. One, you need to reach the speed of light first where you will be dividing by zero. Two, taking the square root of a negative number gives you a result which does not map to the number system you are using to determine energy in the first place.
I don't agree.
The mathematics is only there to describe what the physics is doing. Physics isn't constrained by a limitation in our mathematical representation. If or when we do break the light barrier there will be new mathematical equations derived to describe the phenomena.
Remember that the sound barrier was also once thought to be impossible to break. That's because as an aircraft goes faster, the density in front of the aircraft increases. Mathematically the amplitude of the sound waves build as the plane approaches the speed of sound, overlapping and creating a 'barrier' at exactly the speed of sound. Many thought this barrier was impossible to break. Now we have new mathematical equations to describe supersonic flight.
How do you know this? Have you ever participated? Do you think all the participants are stupid? I hate people like you.
I know this because I am a systems engineer at a well known space robotics company, i.e. I do embedded systems for a living.
I don't think they're stupid. Maybe they just took an approach they know and are familiar with. That's often easier than an unfamiliar approach regardless of how simple it is.
Yes and those are driven by strict government rules.
NASA requires very strict reporting on all government contracts : weekly / monthly status reports, audits on all hours billed, checks on development and test procedures, etc. They also require that major contractors use lots of geographically diverse smaller subcontractors, effectively spreading the money around.
All of these minor subcontractors have the same reporting and traceability requirements to the major subcontractors as the major contractors have to NASA.
With 3 to 4 layers of subcontracting out as is typical, you can easily see how a lot of money gets taken up in overhead with little work to show for it.
At a certain point of complexity, I fully agree to use a real OS. However for many of these smaller applications, an OS is overkill.
Not every application needs an operating system. Remember they landed on the moon with a computer that had only 4k of storage. That computer definitely did not have an RTOS.
NASA is mainly an administrative body to hand out contracts and monitor their executon. Almost everything NASA does is executed by subcontractors such as Boeing, Locheed Martin, United Space Alliance, etc.
So in effect NASA is already privatized and has been for some time.
Yeah, that's a great point. Writing an entire kernel and low level operating system before you even start the application framework is -much- easier. Why didn't I think of that before?
My point was you don't need all of that crap. You don't need anything more complicated than a simple loop and you read the hardware timer to do precision timing operations for each of your processing sections. It is impossible to time things more precisely than this method, regardless of the operating system you choose.
The boot section would take all of 5 to 10 lines of code, so yes it IS much easier.
Why would you bother with either of those OS's anyway? It's not like you need any preemptive multitasking features in such a small application anyway.
The teams would be better off ditching their OS and putting everything in a tight loop on a simple roll your own kernel. The time saved not having to configure the OS and its real time extensions could be instead spent on game logic.
NASA calculated that that servicing mission,whether robotic or shuttle, would cost over one billion dollars US. The only "market" that could pick up that kind of tab (or anything close to it) would be the Japanese or European space agencies. Private companies have a hard time just getting a sattelite into orbit. The Russians might have the technology, but they could not realistically fund the mission.
The development of the robotic portion only costs $150 million. The rest is taken up by the replacement instruments,the bound vehicle, the laurel costs, and the people to run the mission.
The probability of success of a robotics mission is IMHO extremely low. You would be hard pressed to build a robot that could service hubble if it was sitting on the ground, much less orbiting in zero G in the cold of space.
MDRobotics, the company contracted to build the servicing robot, has already demonstrated all of the robotic operations required of it on the Hubble mockup at Goddard space centre. So yes, it IS possible .
No, the problem is not the gryos - they will run on the electricity from the photo cells - The problem is that you do not have thrust anymore to lift it back into orbit (it falls slowly) nor do you have thrust to turn the bugger. Once the orbit decays too far, it will rapidly slow down due to the far upper atmosphere and then fall onto the earth. IT should come in shortly after the shutdown date
Don't be ridiculous. Hubble is at or altitude of 500 Km, much higher than LEO satellites and the space station. It would take years to de-orbit.
The problem is the gyros. Once they fail, fine orientation control will be impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
My local McDonald's never carried Happy Meals because they thought it wasn't worth the hassle.
What would happen is we would get really clear images of relatively close bright objects, and never see what Hubble can see.
Ground based telescopes cannot take images such as Hubble Ultra Deep Field. These images helped prove the age of the universe, find dark matter and look back to almost when the universe was created.
Because now that they know more, they know it is too dangerous.
For the Apollo flights, it was just sheer dumb luck that no solar flare occurred while they were outside the protection of the Earths magnetosphere. If it had the crew would have been killed instantly. Ignorance really was bliss in that case.
No protection from radiation is probably the primary reason why we can't go to Mars yet.
They already demonstrated robotic replacement of gyros on the ground with a mockup of Hubble and the rescue robot testbed, so no its not that hard for a robot.
Of course they could do it for less, much less. However NASA would never allow it.
Sending up an inconsequential communications satellite for cheap is one thing, but quite another for a $1 Billion irreplaceable telescope. That means higher reliability, which means higher cost .
Thanks for responding. Adaptive optics are amazing and a great advancement in ground based telescopes. And I have no doubt that if Hubble tried to take a image of what one of these newer scopes can see, and you compared the resulting images , that Hubble would probably lose.
Why then do I say that these scopes cant take the pictures that Hubble can? For the simple fact that the Earths' atmosphere is opaque to most radiation that is interesting to astronomy. Also Hubble can see objects in the visible spectrum that are too faint for ground based telescopes to see.
Earth based telescopes can only view the visible spectrum, and some radio (less than 1% of radio waves reach the Earths surface). Since the visible spectrum is only a very small part of what is interesting to look at, ground based telescopes are inherently limited.
For the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, not only can ground based telescopes not stay on the same spot that long, but the part of the images were taken in infrared, again unviewable from the ground. And for those that think Hubble is old, these images were taken with the new camera installed in 2002. These images were impossible for the cameras that used to be on Hubble, and is still impossible for any other telescope in the world. Check http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/07/text/ for more information.
Not sure where you get the impression that the gyros were not 'pluggable'.
All six gyros were replaced during the 1999 shuttle mission to upgrade the Hubble, and the proposed repair robot is intended to replace them all yet again. (This has been successfully robotically demonstrated on the ground too by the way.)
Gyros are a limited lifetime item. If you were to replace Hubble with another telescope as some suggest, it would still have the exact same gyro problem.
Since Hubble is upgradeable, and has been four times now, it is essentially a new telescope. It is really only the frame and some of the electronics that are old.
Hubble's capabilities now are vastly superior to what they were say 5-7 years ago.
This is a common misconception and completely untrue. It is impossible for ground based telescopes (ANY ground based telescope) to take images that Hubble can. Look at the Hubble Deep field images. These can only be taken from an orbiting observatory.
Most of the items on Hubble are designed to be replaceable in orbit, which is why a robot is able to be designed to replace exactly the things you identify.
Interestingly, James Webb is NOT serviceable because of its orbit.
Several million? Try $350 million per year just to keep Hubble up there and operating. Not many countries can afford that.
And yes I do think it is worth it.
You're dreaming if you think you can launch a Hubble sized object for $150 million.
Given the mass of Hubble, the launch vehicle design and construction, and the fault tolerance that would have to be adhered to, that launch would more likely be $250 to $500 million.
You can't find any because they don't exist, the poster you quoted is just making shit up.
No spacecraft uses AO because there is no need. Compensation of thermal effects is done by proper mechanical engineering design, not in the optics.
Can't see what this would possibly give over Google or other great search engines. What possible benefit could Microsoft give to this that is not already there? Why bother reinventing the wheel, except for the purpose of desktop domination?
First post?
I don't agree.
The mathematics is only there to describe what the physics is doing. Physics isn't constrained by a limitation in our mathematical representation. If or when we do break the light barrier there will be new mathematical equations derived to describe the phenomena.
Remember that the sound barrier was also once thought to be impossible to break. That's because as an aircraft goes faster, the density in front of the aircraft increases. Mathematically the amplitude of the sound waves build as the plane approaches the speed of sound, overlapping and creating a 'barrier' at exactly the speed of sound. Many thought this barrier was impossible to break. Now we have new mathematical equations to describe supersonic flight.
Well in electrical engineering current has an imaginary component (phasor), and in fact it is absolutely necessary for many calculations.
Not being allowed to take the square root of a negative number is a very stupid reason for not being able to go faster than the speed of light.
I know this because I am a systems engineer at a well known space robotics company, i.e. I do embedded systems for a living.
I don't think they're stupid. Maybe they just took an approach they know and are familiar with. That's often easier than an unfamiliar approach regardless of how simple it is.
Yes and those are driven by strict government rules.
NASA requires very strict reporting on all government contracts : weekly / monthly status reports, audits on all hours billed, checks on development and test procedures, etc. They also require that major contractors use lots of geographically diverse smaller subcontractors, effectively spreading the money around.
All of these minor subcontractors have the same reporting and traceability requirements to the major subcontractors as the major contractors have to NASA.
With 3 to 4 layers of subcontracting out as is typical, you can easily see how a lot of money gets taken up in overhead with little work to show for it.
At a certain point of complexity, I fully agree to use a real OS. However for many of these smaller applications, an OS is overkill.
Not every application needs an operating system. Remember they landed on the moon with a computer that had only 4k of storage. That computer definitely did not have an RTOS.
NASA is mainly an administrative body to hand out contracts and monitor their executon. Almost everything NASA does is executed by subcontractors such as Boeing, Locheed Martin, United Space Alliance, etc.
So in effect NASA is already privatized and has been for some time.
My point was you don't need all of that crap. You don't need anything more complicated than a simple loop and you read the hardware timer to do precision timing operations for each of your processing sections. It is impossible to time things more precisely than this method, regardless of the operating system you choose.
The boot section would take all of 5 to 10 lines of code, so yes it IS much easier.
Why would you bother with either of those OS's anyway? It's not like you need any preemptive multitasking features in such a small application anyway.
The teams would be better off ditching their OS and putting everything in a tight loop on a simple roll your own kernel. The time saved not having to configure the OS and its real time extensions could be instead spent on game logic.
Don't be ridiculous. Hubble is at or altitude of 500 Km, much higher than LEO satellites and the space station. It would take years to de-orbit.
The problem is the gyros. Once they fail, fine orientation control will be impossible.