Upgraded Hubble To Be 90 Times As Powerful

The feed brings us a New Scientist review of the repairs and new instruments that astronauts will bring to the Hubble Space Telescope next August (unless the launch is delayed). The resulting instrument will be 90 times as powerful as Hubble was designed to be when launched, and 60% more capable than it was after its flawed optics were repaired in 1993. If the astronauts pull it off — and the mission is no slam-dunk — the space telescope should be able to image galaxies back to 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Huh, I must have blinked.

[Hellad (691810)]

Last I heard, it was being dumped. Anyone want to give some info on when they changed their mind re. the hubble's fate?

Re:Huh, I must have blinked.

[afidel (530433)]

When the new director took over one of his first acts was to reinstate the Hubble upgrade. Really it's one of the most cost effective missions that NASA can do from a science per dollar perspective and one of the few ones that needs the shuttle before it's decommissioned.

Re:Huh, I must have blinked.

[Strider- (39683)]

Just prior to the "Return To Flight" mission after the Columbia mission, I had the opportunity to talk to two retired shuttle astronauts, one of whom had been involved in the first Hubble servicing mission. I asked them whether given the opportunity, they'd be willing to fly another mission to the Hubble even without the post-Columbia modifications. To a man, they both said "Absolutely, In a heartbeat." In their eyes, the Hubble was one of the few truly useful missions performed by the space shuttle.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[hdparm (575302)]

It's not bloody pictures! It's seeing proof that we have our maths right.

Re:Hubble: Reminder about bloody pictures

[fygment (444210)]

Without them, Hubble would have failed to capture public interest and consequently would have been lobbed into the atmosphere the first time they considered its fate. So, frankly, it is all about the "bloody pictures" because the math only interests a small minority.

Most people don't care how or why a roses exist, it is enough that they are beautiful and fragrant and inspiring.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[4D6963 (933028)]

What could we do with an extra $350 million?

We could finance about 7 hours of the war in Iraq?

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[rbanffy (584143)]

Even if you look at NASA as a pork barrel tool that feed the aerospace industry, it's a lot better to feed them thru NASA than it is to feed them through the military.

In the end, less people get hurt, less people get really pissed of and we end up with better pictures.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[toleraen (831634)]

Yeah, totally. Oh wait, the DOD funded the development of the Internet, advanced wireless communications, GPS, tons of medical advances, and numerous other projects that you probably benefit from. It's not all death and destruction [darpa.mil] you know. Personally, I'm happier to see the advancements in medical treatment than I am the pretty pictures.

Re:

[pnewhook (788591)]

We could spend the $350 million paying for open source software to be developed. That would pay for, conservatively, hundreds of projects, or a few flagships with the impact of Apache or Firefox.

Now THAT is a colossal waste of money. Why would anyone give money to a bunch of teenagers when they are stupid enough to develop and release software for free? Besides. who gets to decide what is useful to develop and what isn't? What's useful for one may be a complete waste of time to someone else.

Software dev

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[AaronLawrence (600990)]

The problem is that for the cost of a single shuttle maintenance mission to Hubble you could build and launch a new telescope.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[blahplusplus (757119)]

"The problem is that for the cost of a single shuttle maintenance mission to Hubble you could build and launch a new telescope."

That may be true but there also may be benefits in learning to repair what we have, that go beyond merely the "launch and trash" philosophy, i.e. when resources are limited. What kinds of new technologies will be spawned to learn how to repair existing stuff in space and what will be learned I think is just as valuable since sooner or later we will have to learn whether others want it or not.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[afidel (530433)]

Not really, even the most pessimistic calculations put the cost of a manned mission at well under $2B whereas the most optimistic predictions for the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) put it at $4.5B with typical overruns that puts it closer to $6B and it's not even planned to launch until 2013.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[jcnnghm (538570)]

About $4.5 Billion [wikipedia.org]. It's much cheaper to repair and upgrade than to replace.

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[AdmiralWeirdbeard (832807)]

My favorite part of all of this is that your argument basically consists of an unsupported claim that hubble accomplishes nothing more than taking pretty pictures, followed by what is essentially an exploration of the opportunity cost of funding hubble's repairs. Exactly what kind of argument is that? Of course $350 million could be well spent on other areas of research, that's not an argument against the repairs, that's the inherent nature of the decision. By choosing A, you necessarily lose out on options B, C, D, etc.
What you have not done, at all, in either of your posts here is offer a single reason that hubble is undeserving of these funds. Clearly, you think hubble is a wast of money. Clearly its a lot of money and other areas of research could benefit from getting it instead. ...and?

Re:Hubble: Right answer to wrong question

[OzoneLad (899155)]

Similarly, keeping the Hubble alive because we've already sunk billions is just trying to justify sunk costs despite the fact that we aren't getting a positive marginal return on our investments. The hole just keeps getting deeper, because we won't stop digging.

If one kept looking for the immediate, short term ROI, most pure science projects would never get funded at all. Increasing the knowledge of humanity is never (alright, almost never) a waste of money. There's no telling what practical applications the next discovery might have.

I'm sure Max Planck would be quite amazed at what we've gotten done using the concept of quantum, even though it seemed to be little more than a mathematical trick when he first thought of it.

Usual editorial fuck up

[by Anonymous Coward]

and 60% more capable than it was after its flawed optics were repaired in 1993.

Article says compared to the ACS of the *third* servicing mission, which if you know your stuff, was in March 2002.

Red shift balls

[by Anonymous Coward]

>> 400 million years after the Big Bang

That's about how long it feels like it's been since my last big bang.

What's a bang?

[mi (197448)]

You, insensitive clod!

Re:

[Jesus_666 (702802)]

It's the second character in a shell script.

Re:Red shift balls

[Vskye (9079)]

That's about how long it feels like it's been since my last big bang.

Got married didn't ya. :)

Was Hubble worth it?

[bogaboga (793279)]

I am having doubts as to whether Hubble was worth it. My gut feeling tells me that the monies used in the entire Hubble project would have changed lots of American lives in a big positive way. What have we got out of it that is worth all those billions spent so far? Can somebody convince me?

Re:Was Hubble worth it?

[anthonys_junk (1110393)]

The fundamental problem with your statement is that you assume that the $$$ would otherwise have been used to change lives in a big positive way.

Put very simply, through science, we gain an understanding of the world, and universe around us, how it operates and how we can interact more effectively with it.

Re:Was Hubble worth it?

[WaZiX (766733)]

You could argue the same thing about all fundamental research... But how much of todays practical applications would have been discovered if we hadn't sponsored research in quantum physics?

Now of course the direct link between Hubble telescope and daily applications is less obvious, but it did determine the Hubble constant (well a more accurate estimate) and determined that the expansion of the universe was accelerating... Now you can challenge the usefulness of these discoveries all you can, but I somehow believe that in the long run, understanding the physics that rule this universe will generate vastly more practical applications (and revenues) then the current (and already beaten) missile defense system...

In the long run we're all dead, but that doesn't mean we should focus solely on short term objectives (and I'm very very glad our ancestors didn't)/

Re:Was Hubble worth it?

[Karthikkito (970850)]

You've been modded flamebait by someone, but it's a legitimate question that many people have when looking at instruments designed for pure science and discovery. There are quite a few really good arguments about why the Hubble should be around which are based on the science mission, but I'll give you an example of positive spinoffs that affect our daily lives. Google will give you many more.

-----
"NASA's TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER PROGRAM FOR TEE EARLY DETECTION OF BREAST CANCER", available at ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel4/5216/14105/00646457.pdf?tp=&isnumber=&arnumber=646457

One NASA-driven development has already found its way into clinical use as part of the LORAD; stereotactic needle
biopsy system. The charge-coupled device (CCD) camera used in this system was originally designed and built for use
in the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, and provides a high-resolution, high-contrast image in real time
to guide a physician in the accurate collection of a biopsy sample from suspicious imaged breast lesions. The Hubble
CCD, coupled with a high-speed phosphor screen, gives greatly increased sensitivity, contrast and resolution over
previous methods, The result is a less traumatic, lower cost ($800 vs. $2,500 typically for surgical biopsy), non-surgical biopsy procedure for the more than 500,000 American women who undergo breast biopsies each year.
-------

Here, Hubble directly increased the ability for us to find cancers. When you look at a dollar amount, (2500-800)*500000 gives us $0.85 billion per year. Note that this article was published in 1996; today, mammograms and biopsies are much more common. To keep things simple, if we assume a constant number of patients, the Hubble CCD alone has directly resulted in cost savings of $9.35 billion (let alone lives saved). Also note that the cost of scalpel biopsies is mostly based on labor, and so would not have dropped much beyond the $2500 level; CCD's have become very inexpensive (relative to costs in 1996) and so the savings would actually be significantly larger than calculated here.

Anyone know the true cost of a non-surgical biopsy today?

Re:Bullcra

[Repossessed (1117929)]

And if that money had been spent in the private sector, mamograms would be patented by Pfizer, and cost 5 times as much as the old method.

Re:

[hung_himself (774451)]

More likely, the money would have been spent by NIH to develop the technology, and then have it patented by Pfizer, and cost 5 times as much as the old method.

Re:Was Hubble worth it?

[jdigriz (676802)]

Wikipedia says the cumulative cost of the Hubble program has been 6.5 billion dollars. The population of the United States is approximately 300 million people. That means that the Hubble over its entire lifespan cost every man, woman and child in the United States $21.67 each. So no, all the monies spent on it would not have changed lots of American lives in a big positive way. Considering that all that money was paid over the course of the last 18 years, that means each person paid the equivalent of a little over a dollar per year for the wonderful pictures and discoveries it made. So, are the secrets of the universe, or even just pretty pictures worth a third of a cent per day? I think so. 6.5 billion dollars in the hands of one person is a lot of money. 6.5 billion dollars spread across 300 million people over 20 years is practically nothing. If you want to consider real money, consider the > 450 billion dollars spent over the last 5 years on the Iraq war, or the 450 Billion dollar Defense budget spent every year which doesn't even include war operations.

Investing in science makes sense

[Siener (139990)]

I came in here to say almost exactly what the parent post said - If you had taken all the Hubble money and rather spent it on some social program it would come down to basically $1 per US citizen per year over the last 20 years.

Money spent on pure science is usually a good investment because the returns are cumulative. The new knowledge that we gain can potentially benefit the human race in all perpetuity.

E.g. Of the immense amount of technology that gives you the ability to post here in Slashdot large port

Re:

[rucs_hack (784150)]

I think you'll find that NASA, and all its associated costs, (aside from the flying turkey that is the ISS), take up less than 0.02% of the total US budget. It might be smaller than that, this is from memory, I can't re-find the source, which was a newspaper.

Its a tiny, tiny amount though. The problem is that the space program has always been blown by the political winds. People remember that once, long ago, it did indeed consume vast amounts of cash, and they assume this continues today. NASA then and NASA

Re:

[sqldr (838964)]

The telescope DID improve American and non-American lives in a big positive way by getting us closer to understanding the universe we live in - something that most people would like to understand.

"big positive way" doesn't necessarily equate to giving people handouts or curing diabetes. If all we ever spent our money on was egalitarianism, our lives would be so boring we wouldn't see the point. I'm very happy that money has been spent on hubble, and its findings never cease to excite me.

Re:

[SL Baur (19540)]

Only solving overpopulation is going to improve lives.

This is slashdot and that problem has already been solved here. Next?

Pictures smictures...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Can it or can it not fry people like ants under a magnifying glass.

That's what we want to know.

what "90 times more powerful means"

[bcrowell (177657)]

Most people think the magnification of a telescope is the most important number, whereas astronomers are typically more interested in the light-gathering power, as measured by the aperture. What's really being increased by a factor of 90 is neither the magnification nor the sensitivity, it's apparently the product of the sensitivity and the area of the field of view. The argument seems to be that this is an important figure of merit if you're doing a survey of faint objects, such as very distant galaxies.

Re:

[rhizome (115711)]

astronomers are typically more interested in the light-gathering power

Isn't this just a fancy way of saying they're interested in capturing fainter objects?

60% better than the 2002 Hubble, not 1993

[CraigParticle (523952)]

The summary is a bit misleading about the 60%.

FTA: "HST will be about 60% more powerful than it was right after the third servicing mission, before ACS and STIS failed."

The 1993 servicing mission generally restored the designed capabilities of the Hubble, the so-called "factor of 90" that the article mentions. Major new improvements and capabilities came with each servicing mission, culminating in the March 2002 servicing mission that installed the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

The upcoming installation of the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) will improve the combined sensitivity and field of view by 60% over the Hubble as it was after March 2002 (and before ACS died).

To be fair... by the same metric, modern ground-based telescopes with large format CCD and infrared arrays are on the order of 100 times more powerful than they were in 1990 as well. In the near infrared, the gains are closer to a factor of 1000!

What Big Bang?

[Swampash (1131503)]

The Earth is only 6,000 years old. Mike Huckabee wouldn't lie to me.

Re:What Big Bang?

[WaZiX (766733)]

It's not a lie if he honestly believes what he says to be the truth.

Indeed, it's called gullibility.

1.6

[tsa (15680)]

So actually it's going to be only 1.6 times better than before, because before the first big repair to improve the optics the thing was mostly unusable. Am I right?

Designed as flawed?

[Urkki (668283)]

The resulting instrument will be 90 times as powerful as Hubble was designed to be when launched, and 60% more capable than it was after its flawed optics were repaired in 1993.

Is it just my reading comprehension, or does above text actually claim, that Hubble was designed to be launched with a faulty optics, that optics repair then improved it some 30 times, and now the new upgrades will improve it 3 times more...?

Or, to put it the other way, is this improvement actually 60% (still a lot!) over current situation, and the "90 times as powerful" is basically just bullshit hype?

Re:

[Sockatume (732728)]

It wasn't designed to have bad optics. The big-name private contractor who built the mirror screwed up because they misassembled one of the instruments used in manufacturing it. This sort of thing happens all the time of course - recall that the Genesis capsule cratered in the desert because Lockheed-Martin installed an accelerometer backwards and skipped the test which would've spotted the mistake.

Re:Awesome!

[KillerCow (213458)]

You know, almost all of those astronomical images are artificially colored and enhanced to maximize their ascetic appeal. Have a look at some of the various images of the cat's eye nebula to see. A quick Google turns up 5 different colorings:

http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Cats_Eye_Nebula.jpg [daviddarling.info]
http://www.uni-sw.gwdg.de/~panders/Images/AstroImages/03_CatEyeNebula.jpg [uni-sw.gwdg.de]
http://www.spacetoday.org/images/Hubble/HubbleBeauty/CatsEyeNebulaNASA.jpg [spacetoday.org]
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/NGC6543.jpg [wikimedia.org]
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Cats_Eye_Nebula_2.jpg [daviddarling.info]

The interpretation of the horsehead nebula is at least consistent (most of the time), but there is still plenty of artistic license being taken.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/52238main_MM_image_feature_89_jw4.jpg [nasa.gov]
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/45506main_MM_Image_Feature_73_rs4.jpg [nasa.gov]
http://www.geocities.com/scott_metz/alternity/graphics/horsehead_nebula.jpg [geocities.com]
http://www.sidewalk-astronomy-club.com/img/horsehead-nebula.jpg [sidewalk-a...y-club.com]
http://www.fourthdimensionastroimaging.com/sitebuilder/images/horsehead-712x571.jpg [fourthdime...maging.com]

I was sort of disappointed when I found that out...

Re:Awesome!

[amRadioHed (463061)]

The images have to be artificially colored because more often than not the images are put together from images outside the visible wavelength. None of those images would be interesting to humans in the original wavelengths.

Re:

[CaptnMArk (9003)]

They are very interesting, just not visible.

Re:

[blincoln (592401)]

True, but how about some good old black&white then when the original color isn't know?

Then you'd have to look at three times as many pictures to get the same amount of information, and none of them would be as pleasing to the human eye.
The convention that NASA seems to use is that they map the lowest-frequency channel to red, the middle to green, and the highest to blue. That's about as consistent as you can get when dealing with multispectral imagery.
If you really want black and white, just use the GIM

Re:Awesome!

[Cassius Corodes (1084513)]

I was sort of disappointed when I found that out...

Wait till you find out that the visible spectrum is artificially coloured by human vision.

Re:Awesome!

[themacks (1197889)]

You may appreciate this then: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/index.php [hubblesite.org]

From the site:

Taking color pictures with the Hubble Space Telescope is much more complex than taking color pictures with a traditional camera. For one thing, Hubble doesn't use color film -- in fact, it doesn't use film at all. Rather, its cameras record light from the universe with special electronic detectors. These detectors produce images of the cosmos not in color, but in shades of black and white.

Finished color images are actually combinations of two or more black-and-white exposures to which color has been added during image processing.

The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye

Re:Awesome!

[rucs_hack (784150)]

The coloration of such images is thought of as being as much the artistic expression of the astronomer in question as it is clarification of the image.

The thing is, without coloration, we wouldn't be able to see the various structures. Astronomers probably would, being trained, but not us normal folk. Besides, who wants to look at dull greyscale when you can spice it up with some color? The aim of making the image easier to interpret is achieved, and it looks pretty too.

Re:

[hylander_sb (181045)]

It does have a 486 on board so if you can get the Flight Software guys to add it in, it could.

Re:

[4D6963 (933028)]

Why yes, but, the real question is... will it blend?

2007 just called, they want their viral marketing Internet meme back.

Re:planning for James Webb Space Telescope upgrade

[Aardpig (622459)]

None whatsoever. It's going to be at the L1 Lagrange point; this means that repair missions are not really possible. This was an easy way for NASA administrators to avoid the long-term budgetary overhead incurred by upkeep. (That said, there's also a good science justification for putting the telescope at L1).