Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Final Repair Mission To Extend Hubble's Life

Posted by kdawson on Tue Dec 04, 2007 05:56 PM
from the gyros-batteries-and-a-quart-of-oil dept.
Space Science
necro81 writes "The NYTimes has an in-depth piece describing an upcoming shuttle mission, scheduled for next August, to make a final service call to the Hubble Space Telescope. After the Columbia accident and the scheduled shuttle decommission in 2010, additional service trips to the telescope were off the table. The resulting hue and cry from scientists, legislators, and the public forced NASA to reconsider. Next August, if all goes well, Atlantis will grab Hubble, replace its aging gyros, attempt to revive the Advanced Camera for Surveys, and install a new camera and spectrograph. The telescope could then continue doing science well into the next decade."
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: One Last Ride for Hubble by necro81 (917438)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Final Repair Mission To Extend Hubble's Life 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chess_the_cat (653159) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:04PM (#21579007) Homepage
    The Hubble has to be NASA's greatest success. And where Apollo was a triumph in engineering, Hubble is a triumph in pure science.

    • No way (Score:4, Informative)

      by Quadraginta (902985) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:15PM (#21579101)
      Nonsense. COBE [wikipedia.org] was far more significant. There's much more to science than pretty pictures!

      • Re:No way (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dgatwood (11270) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:51PM (#21579429) Journal

        True, but I would argue that Hubble and the Mars rovers have done far more to promote space science to the masses. In an era where scientific research is often the first thing on the chopping block, the importance of projects like Hubble should not be underestimated.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anti_Climax (447121)
        COBE did help to create This [deviantart.com] pretty picture.

        From the XKCD Store page [xkcd.com]:

        The graph on the back of the shirt is data from the COBE mission, which looked at the background microwave glow of the universe and found that it fit perfectly with the idea that the universe used to be really hot everywhere. This strongly reinforced the Big Bang theory and was one of the most dramatic examples of an experiment agreeing with a theory in history -- the data points fit perfectly, with error bars too small t

      • Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)

        by googleSky (1198437) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @08:51PM (#21580421)
        Let me further follow up on this silly comment. While producing its remarkable results, COBE was hardly "far more significant" than Hubble. COBE's measurements confirmed the isotropy or, rather, the extremely low levels of anisotropy of the CMB -- to a high order of confidence. But the CMB was actually observed decades earlier by Penzias and Wilson at Greenbank. WMAP further improved on COBE results.

        Despite Quadraginta's blinkered belief that Hubble produces only "pretty pictures!" Hubble has been crucial in the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe, a result that has turned our understanding of the universe into an utter lack of understanding: we now have no idea what comprises 96% of the universe (dark energy and dark matter). This observation apparently vindicated Einstein's lamda, which even Einstein claimed was his biggest blunder. Others, though, now speculate that the accelerated expansion could be a manifestation of temporal pathology.

        Hubble certainly has produced pretty pictures, but this weird fixation that there is somehow a "competition" between scientific instruments has simply got to stop. These missions are designed as complements to further our understanding of the physical universe.

    • Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Informative)

      by wildsurf (535389) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:15PM (#21579107) Homepage

      And where Apollo was a triumph in engineering, Hubble is a triumph in pure science.
      Well, except for that pesky myopia debacle. [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by filterban (916724) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:24PM (#21579205) Homepage Journal
        Yes, there was a flaw in the mirror. I remember the size of the flaw being described at a space museum tour as:

        "Take one strand of your hair. Cut it lengthwise 36 times; take one of those strands and cut it another 36 times lengthwise."

        To me, that just underscores the difficulty in putting a telescope in space. True, the flaw was considered a debacle, but NASA fixed it by correcting the instruments on the telescope by an equally offsetting amount. This has led to amazing discoveries and the Hubble can largely be viewed as a success.

        In my mind, it's a shame that we won't be keeping it running past 2013.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by khallow (566160)
          The flaw was a lot bigger than that. As I dimly recall it, they did a "knife edge" test on the Hubble and placed the edge significantly out of place. Supposedly, a human could have easily run the knife edge test and detected the flaw visually. But the error was done precisely to around an eighth of a wavelength of visual light (not sure what the frequency was). So it was possible to get good pictures just by processing the images. Further, the precision of the error meant that the corrective optics restored

        • Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Informative)

          by CJ145 (1110297) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @10:23PM (#21581069)
          In 2013 there is suppose to be a new telescope that should be capable of replacing Hubble. http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
      • >> And where Apollo was a triumph in engineering, Hubble is a triumph in pure science.

        > Well, except for that pesky myopia debacle.

        Despite which its first light picture was better than any ground based scopes could manage. It showed a known star to be a binary, a fact which wasn't known prior. That's a pretty poor debacle compared to, say installing an accelerometer upside down and doing very expensive post hole digging with a dust collection satellite.

        • Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Sanat (702) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @11:38PM (#21581597)
          "That's a pretty poor debacle compared to, say installing an accelerometer upside down"

          We fired a missile out of Vandenburg a few years ago that had the angular accelerometer wires color coded backwards. The test coil was wired correctly so all diagnostics passed.

          When the missile was fired and cleared the underground silo it was normal for the missile to pitch towards 70 degrees. As it approached that angle the the speed of pitching is reduced to zero, however if the accelerometer is reverse wired then the missile pitches faster instead of slower and the missile simply cleared the silo wall and pitched level to the ground shooting across the fields at what seemed to be a thousand miles an hour and it started a couple of fires and also caused a lot of scrambling of onlookers until the range officer was able to destruct it.

          We were out with our field jackets extinguishing the fires and then had to pick up all of the unburned propellant (green solid fuel).

          Of course, we kept some propellant back and would ignited it in ashtrays and stuff like that as practical jokes. I wonder how I survived some of the stuff I was involved with in those days.

        • Source of your information please? I think this is wrong. I worked on Hubble (software) and I NEVER heard that story and I knew many people from the original development team.

        • That, and when they fixed the lens they also replaced all of the on-board electronics, because JPL and NASA had consumed too much of the component life before the satellite was even launched into space.

          Except - they didn't replace all the on-board electronics when they installed the fix for the mirror. (Hubble's problem was a flawed mirror - not a flawed lens.)
           
           

          Hint: if you want to lifetime test a part to make sure it's reliable, don't use that part in your satellite after burning up its usable life. Buy two parts from the same batch, test one, and use the other one.

          Hint: NASA and JPL know that. You don't seem to know much of anything, since both of the 'facts' in your introductory statement are actually 'fantasies'.
    • : "If that wasn't the mother ship, what the hell did we just blow up?"
      : "The hubble telescope."

  • Aging gyros? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bobb Sledd (307434) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:14PM (#21579099) Homepage
    I wonder if those are lamb or beef gyros...

    (Yes I know it is bad.)

  • The kind of science we all need (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In my early years in physics I worked on shuttles, and then on environmental cleanups and nu-cu-lar waste disposal. Many times I used Hubble as example of what we could do right in science: so often critics have said that they never see what good could come out of it. Hubble has made that entire line of "reasoning" disappear. SEEING the results, in the visible spectrum, FREELY available... Could we find something similar for this current emphasis in biophysics? C'mon slashdot, let's take science to the mas

    • Re:The kind of science we all need (Score:5, Informative)

      by twiddlingbits (707452) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @08:00PM (#21580033)
      Hubble does not "see" the pictures you find published. The data is a series of binary values in different frequencys and intensities depending on what filter is in use and which "camera" (WFC or COS) it came from. The colors are "false" colors created on the ground to match the data values as closely as possible.
      • Sure, but the result are pictures, and those pictures are beautiful and give people a feel for the science. If only other sciences and technologies could do the same!

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ckaminski (82854)
        Just like digital cameras don't produce pictures either...

        Nor celluloid film...

        Even your retinas create images in a similar fashion, a collection of light hitting photo-sensitive receptor sites.

  • Are the advantages of having Hubble outside the atmosphere still worth the expense? I'd rather see NASA spending their money on Mars.

    I thought I had heard that new ground-based telescope technology has largely made the benefits of the old Hubble obsolete. Does anyone know anything more specific on that?
    • Sure, adaptive optics allows ground-based 'scopes to do SOME of the things that only Hubble could previously do. However, anything requiring high-contrast imaging, photometric stability, or spectral uniformity still greatly benefits from Hubble. Given that astronomers request 10 times as much time on Hubble as there actually is, there's still plenty of science that only it can do.

    • Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Aardpig (622459) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:45PM (#21579363)

      Well, the fact that our atmosphere is opaque to UV? If you want to do UV observations, and in particular UV spectroscopy, then going above the atmosphere is the only way to do it. Nothing on the ground will *ever* be able to observe in the UV.

      Similar considerations apply to the mid- and far-IR -- the Spitzer space telescope can access wavebands that are simply not visible from the ground.

    • Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ThreeGigs (239452) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:45PM (#21579367)
      Ozone blocks ultraviolet, water vapor absorbs strongly in the infrared, dust particles et al emit in infrared too, causing a huge loss of contrast.

      Sadly, the atmosphere isn't really as transparent as it looks once you get outside the visible spectrum, and that's where 50% (a statistic made up on the spot) of astronomy breakthroughs are.

      Future scopes in space are likely to be infrared (Webb), ultraviolet, radio and x-ray specific. Plus, adaptive optics are still only a band-aid(R) compared to viewing outside the atmosphere.
    • There is this thing called adaptive optics, which corrects for atmospheric turbulence by bending the secondary mirror in real time with 600 magnetic actuators. However, there is a bit of a problem making it work... the LBT being built by my employer Steward Observatory has had at least two of the 1 meter diameter, 1.6 mm thick secondary mirrors crack before installation (they currently have zero good adaptive secondaries). But when it works, as it has on the MMT, it works quite well.
    • What about the other orbital telescopes up there already? Chandra and Spitzer already do a lot of the science that Hubble was being used for, considering those platforms...and isn't their one more...does Hubble still make sense?
    • Err. I believe the cost benefit analysis for saving Hubble comes back in the red. I do not have a source for this, but space walks are dangerous and complicated operations and the last time they repaired the Hubble, it almost ended in catastrophe.

      There are a few things that Hubble can do that no other telescope can. However, those things will be done much better by the James Webb Space Telescope [wikipedia.org] to be launched sometime after 2013.
      • JWST may be the political successor of Hubble, but it will not replace its capabilities. JWST operates only in the infrared; Hubble's primary contributions are in the visible (and the UV). These spectral coverages are complementary. The launch of JWST (after it finishes hoovering up what's left of the NASA astrophysics budget) will not cause Hubble to become obsolete.
      • However you may have a point about the cost/benefit ratio. For the price of a shuttle launch to repair Hubble (~$1B), you could just about build and launch a new one on an unmanned rocket. If there were a concerted program to launch a virtually identical 2-meter telescope every 4 years with different instrumentation on it, that program would be better and cheaper than continuing to repair Hubble. However, congressional whims being what they are, such a program would inevitably get cut after its first mission, obviating the savings. Hence NASA has opted to continue to repair and update Hubble instead.

    • I'd rather see NASA spending their money on Mars.
      I'd rahter see NASA spending their money on Venus, the most earth-like and habitable planet [wikipedia.org] in our solar system aside from Earth itself.
      • Head explodes? My god! GP, look what you've done! You've gotten him blood and little pieces of brain all over his keyboard and monitor!

  • After replacing the aging gyros ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alain Williams (2972) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @06:29PM (#21579245) Homepage
    NASA will try to get as much positive spin out of Hubble as it can :-)

  • The telescope could then continue doing science well into the next decade.
    Doing science. Now that's what I'm talking about. You give them space robots some more tools, keep em up there with them gadgets, lookin at the moon and whatnot. That's how progress gets done.
  • ...get placed in orbit around the moon. I wonder if it would result in better imaging capability or not.

  • Will it really be the last trip? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xlation (228159) * on Tuesday December 04 2007, @07:47PM (#21579943)
    IIRC we cannot, by treaty, just let the Hubble's orbit decay like Skylab & Mir, we need to do a de-orbit burn and drop it in the Pacific, or some other relatively safe place. The problem was this, is that the Hubble has no rocket engines on board, so we need to send something up there to attach an engine.

    That would be a complicated robotic mission, but there is a further complication... Once enough gyros fail, it will start to tumble. That would make a servicing mission near impossible. (you could no longer just grab it.)

    So once NASA decides that we need to go anyway, why bother to de-orbit it? Servicing Mission 3B was in 2002, if they can get another 6 years out of SM4 that will get them to 2014. If NASA is serious about replacing the shuttle, they should be able to get another manned craft into low-earth orbit by then, even if it is using an off-the-shelf launch system,

    • Re:Will it really be the last trip? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Iskender (1040286) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @09:54PM (#21580901)

      IIRC we cannot, by treaty, just let the Hubble's orbit decay like Skylab & Mir, we need to do a de-orbit burn and drop it in the Pacific, or some other relatively safe place. The problem was this, is that the Hubble has no rocket engines on board, so we need to send something up there to attach an engine.
      From TFA:

      In one additional piece of business, the astronauts will attach a grapple fixture to the bottom of the telescope so that a robot spacecraft could grab it and attach a rocket module in the future. The rocket would then drop the telescope into the ocean.


      They seem to be thinking ahead, almost like it was their job or something. : )

  • Sure brings (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aengblom (123492) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @07:58PM (#21580015) Homepage
    "The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind" [slashdot.org] into context. (It being the last Slashdot story in the Space section.)

  • hue

    Color or shade of color; tint; dye

    hew

    to complain about

    (in before "there are no editors")
  • One more Hubble servicing mission... but the 1.5 billion dollar AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) won't be launched to ISS [orlandosentinel.com] because there aren't enough remaining Shuttle launches.

    Hubble's been fantastic and all, but all the furor, angst and money could have been spent on launching an entirely new telescope into space by now.

  • Mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FridayBob (619244) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @09:15PM (#21580647)
    While I'm glad that the Hubble is going to be repaired, after reading yesterday's article [slashdot.org] about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) [washingtonpost.com] that looks like it won't get delivered to the ISS due to a lack of available shuttle missions, I'm no longer sure it's the right thing to do. Seeing as the AMS took 500 physicists 12 years to build and cost $1.5 billion, and that it's capable of doing new and amazing science, I think it deserves a chance. The Hubble has already been up their for years and will be replaced in 2013 by the James Webb Space Telescope [wikipedia.org] anyway. The AMS has no replacement; not launching it would be worse than not repairing Hubble.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dr. Evil (3501)

      OMG. 500 Physicists, 12 years of work, 1.5 Billion? I'm outraged! The biggest boondoggle in the history of the ISS could have paid for an extra week of war in Iraq!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by moosesocks (264553)
      To be perfectly fair, the JWST will *not* be a drop-in replacement for the Hubble, as it's going to be primarily geared toward observing the infrared spectrum, whereas the Hubble is capable of observing everything between Ultraviolet and Infrared (visible light obviously being included between the two)

      Although there's indeed a great value of having a dedicated IR scope up there, I think that astronomers would agree that keeping the Hubble in orbit will be a very good thing, not to mention the obvious benefi

  • Why are the gyros failing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ChrisMaple (607946) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @10:28PM (#21581111)
    It's been more than 20 years since I was in the inertial navigation business, but my recollection is that there should be no significant wearout mechanism for gyros. Mechanical gyros use air bearings (or possibly magnetic bearings): no contact, no wear. I suppose if they're using laser gyros they'll fail eventually due to problems with impurities or thermal stresses or something.

    Are the control electronics associated with the gyros failing? What gyro technology are they using?

  • Invoice (Score:4, Funny)

    by QuickFox (311231) on Tuesday December 04 2007, @11:43PM (#21581619)
    I bet like all repairmen they'll charge ridiculously large travel expenses.

  • Still alive! (Score:3, Funny)

    by kagaku (774787) on Wednesday December 05 2007, @09:24AM (#21584465)
    I'm doing science and I'm still alive.
    I feel fantastic and I'm still alive.
    While you're dying I'll be still alive.
    And when you're dead I will be still alive.

    Still alive.
    • Since, you know, that money would have no better use than to get a new museum piece... I support funding science, but something like this would not be science, it would just be a tremendous waste of money.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.