NASA Engineers Dispute Hubble Safety Claim 412
Zeinfeld writes "According to the administration, the Hubble space telescope is going to be allowed to die in the next three years because the shuttle mission required to save it would be too risky. Meanwhile the public plans say shuttle missions to the space station will resume. Papers leaked to the New York Times say hogwash. The article (free subscription required) reports claims that money and politics, not safety are the reason. The public NASA story is clearly nonsense, and if the science from Hubble does not justify a shuttle mission, then it's time to pull the plug on the space station. I suspect that is exactly what will happen after the November election."
move link to first page (Score:3, Informative)
Re:STOP NYTIMES ARTICLES! (Score:1, Informative)
two words (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Hubble, space station, which is it? (Score:4, Informative)
google news link (Score:5, Informative)
text (Score:5, Informative)
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 7, 2004
ASA's decision to abandon its crown scientific jewel, the Hubble Space Telescope, cannot be justified on safety grounds, according to a pair of reports by a NASA engineer that have been circulating in scientific and political circles in the last few days.
The unsigned documents are attracting attention on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House Science Committee, which is expected to discuss the Hubble decision at a meeting on Thursday.
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"We're reviewing the Hubble decision, looking at it very closely," said a spokesman for Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York and chairman of the committee. "We're going to be examining the views in this particular document as well as a whole host of others."
The documents have also created a buzz among astronomers, who hope that their wider distribution will help spark a larger debate about the telescope's fate. The reports have deepened astronomers' skepticism that safety and not politics and money was the issue last month when Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, announced the cancellation of the space shuttle's planned 2006 maintenance visit to the telescope. As a result, the telescope will probably die in orbit within three years, astronomers say, instead of lasting into the early part of the next decade as originally planned.
In explaining his decision, Mr. O'Keefe had cited a recommendation of the board that investigated the Columbia space shuttle disaster last year that NASA must develop a way to inspect and repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system.
While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was committed to developing this ability for missions to the International Space Station, which could serve as a "safe haven" for the astronauts if the shuttle was damaged, Mr. O'Keefe said it was too risky and expensive to develop an "autonomous" inspection and repair capability for a single mission to the telescope.
The new reports challenge Mr. O'Keefe's conclusion, citing data and references from NASA documents in arguing that the administrator's statement "cannot be supported."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations and NASA's plans for "return to flight" include ultimately developing just such an ability to inspect and repair the tiles independently of the station. That autonomous ability is needed because the shuttle might fail to make it to the space station, or the space station may become too big and complex to serve as a repair base, according to the papers.
One of the reports concludes that missions to the telescope "are as safe as or perhaps safer than" space station missions "conducted in the same time frame."
The author is a NASA engineer who wrote the reports based on internal data and who declined to be identified for fear of losing his job. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by an astronomer who is not part of NASA and opposes the decision to let the telescope die.
"Those documents certainly undercut the public position of the agency," said Dr. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science.
Dr. Illingworth added that it was important to open up debate on these issues. "We need to get real information out there, and not just have a few people in NASA saying we know what's best," he said.
A Congressional staff member who was given the documents said they appeared to be credible. "We are taking them seriously," he said. Referring to the requirement of an autonomous repair capability, he said, "NASA's going to have to spend the money to do this" if the agency follows the accident board's recommendations.
The documents also argue that missions to the space station might actually be riskier than going to the space telescope for several reasons. Because of the space
Re:STOP NYTIMES ARTICLES! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:move link to first page (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:5, Informative)
Except, of course, for the new generation of ground-based telescopes with better resolving power than the hubble. It's silly to spend more money on inferior technology just because it's space-based and therefor "must be cooler".
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:5, Informative)
Hubble's replacement is scheduled for 2012 and it sees in infrared. Hubble uses visible light spectrum. There is no scheduled replacement for hubble.
I don't know the details of the spectrum that the Webb telescope will be able to view. But viewing only infrared is not as odd as it seems. Visible light and infrared astronomy overlap a great deal. The really deep objects are so greatly red-shifted, they are in the infrared when the light gets to us. And since the Webb telescope is primarily for viewing such objects, this makes sense. But you are right in that it will not be a direct replacement for the Hubble, although it is close.
And I agree that shutting down Hubble makes no sense. It is doing great astronomy and could continue doing so for many years. I also think it's a mistake to put the Webb telescope at the L2 point rather than in Earth orbit. Hubble has shown that the ability to do repair missions is invaluable.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:3, Informative)
Florida law, as it had been on the books for years, had a rather blatent loophole. Kathrine Harris could certify the election results on Monday, or she could, at her sole option, open her office on Saturday for sole purpose of handling the election results then. Knowing that if she waited until Monday and allowed the Palm Beach recount to finish, Gore would win, but if she froze the numbers on Saturday, Bush would win, she chose to put on way too much makeup and announce that the results were certified on Saturday, and therefore Florida would send the presidential electors who had been selected by the Bush campaign.
Media recounts would later find that if Palm Beach had finished, Gore would win. However, if the entire state did a recount, it would be the decision on which standard of chad-counting was used that would decide the winner.
The Florida election was truely too close to call. The number of punchcard ballots that had an unclear intent of the voter were greater than the margin of victory. However, there's no ties in American politics, so we have to pick a winner somehow.
There are several cases where small town political races for offices such as mayor end in a dead heat tie where after several recounts the numbers are exactly the same. In such cases, a random game of chance involving a coin, dice, straws or cards are used as the tiebreaker to determine the final outcome. Given the complexity in Florida... I'd call the process that got us Bush pretty random too.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:1, Informative)
Correction: The Supreme Court overruled a State Supreme Court which was ad libbing election laws during the vote count without regard for the laws of the State of Florida as written, the Florida State Legislature or the Florida Secretary of State.
The law said seven days. SEVEN. Not six. Not eight. Seven days.
Did you fail civics class? (Score:2, Informative)
Faith-based science (Score:5, Informative)
The politics has always overwhelmed the science; my pals in the spacelab DESPISED the scientists as eggheads, the scientists loathed the silliness of manned flight programs which bled the fundpot dry, without any real result. As physicist working in an engineering area, I got shot at by both sides. (A former NASA historian wrote a good treatise on that a few years back; can't recall the particulars.) Here we go again, except that this administration goes WAY further with it's hatred of science. In fact, I'll wager to say that it's his faith-based baloney which is behind this move, along with a goodly dose of wanting only manned programs, for the politics of it, and all science be damned.
http://thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6
BTW, I was asked to lecture to our entire department (about 400 engineers and technicians) when I left in mid-'85. The topic: what can we do to improve. Here's what I said: GET SERIOUS ABOUT SAFETY OR SOMEBODY'S GONNA DIE. And STAND UP AND SAY NO TO THE BOSS WHEN HE SAYS IT'S OK, AND YOU KNOW BETTER.
Re:Report doesn't make sense (Score:2, Informative)
And if you read the article, the Columbia report does say they need this ability to fix problems for the return to orbit as there may be a problem even getting to the ISS. The ISS is only a refuge if you can get to it. If there is a problem at launch and the orbiter doesn't make its intended orbit, you have to have a way to fix things then without ISS.
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it can--you must not be aware of the advances in adaptive optics. There's a reason that the next-generation space telescope isn't designed for visible-light observations--advances in ground-based technology have overtaken the advantages of a space-based platform. (Specifically, with AO the important factor is more mirror size (to sense dimmer objects) then atmosphere, and a space telescope will never be able to compete with a ground telescope in that area in our lifetimes. Add to that the huge cost savings in not boosting the observatory into orbit --effectively increasing the budget for instruments.) Some informative links:
Keck Observatory [hawaii.edu]
European OWL telescope [eso.org]
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:3, Informative)
I worked on a project where we used telescopes with a primary mirror ranging from 2.5 m (that I operated) down to 60 cm (!), and we could do that becuase of the exceptionally good astrometry done by a couple of Hubble snapshots. I wasn't involved in the reduction of the data, but I think the 60 cm data was rather worthless, but you get the idea, it saves us a lot...
So, HST is really valuable, and if it dies, it'll leave a void which would set astronomy back a lot.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:1, Informative)
Of course, the first thing you would have to do in order to achieve the political goal of "cutting the uncuttable", would be to set up the financial crisis necessary to justify the cuts. A crazy "decrease revenue and increase spending" approach would work great. Then you can start cutting things that, previously, nobody probably would ever have agreed to do.
A probably non-unique example: immediately preceding an election, the province of Nova Scotia (Canada) fulfilled the government's promise to cut taxes before the next election by giving out a cheque to everyone in the province for the $155 the tax cut would amount to over the year. Total cost: $70 million (inclusive of what it cost to disburse the cheques, which was a couple million by itself). Election time: Promise kept. Party gets back in (barely).
New budget. Guess what the budget estimate is this year? Why, a $35 million deficit, of course, so all government agencies (including such basics as education and healthcare) will have to tighten their budgets significantly to "balance the budget". Never mind that the provice could have been running a surplus if that $155 had not been returned last year. Sheesh, they could have given out half of it. In a sane situation, people probably would have accepted that the tax cut was not affordable at the originally-planned level, but this is politics, after all, so it: a) buys off voters with their own money, and b) it also creates the budget crisis necessary to cut further (naturally, cutting harshly in some areas and less in others, according to the party's own particular priorities).
Everybody agrees the budget has to be balanced, nobody wants taxes to increase, and *poof*, the government has a mandate to cut whatever is necessary.
I'd say this was fine, except that all too often it is the essential services people care about that get cut too much, while the same old graft and pork are as extravagant as ever. Even better, if the party does lose the next election because people catch on or do not like the result, heh, they've sure put the new government in a bad spot.
I sincerely hope this is not what is happening in the U.S.
Re:Just walk away? (Score:3, Informative)
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Skylab wasn't 'allowed' to die, it was pretty much engineered to be disposable, it had no resupply capability (except whatever could be sent up in the capsules with the crew) - it was sent up with supplies already on board.
The other problem was its orbit. It had been talked about to use the space shuttle to lift Skylab and do some work to it to make it useful again, or at the very least stick a deorbit rocket package on it so it could be brought down in the middle of nowhere without risk of hitting a city. This would have probably happened in 1980, assuming a shuttle rollout in 1979 as planned. But then two things happened: one, a manufacturing problem delayed Columbia's rollout until 1981, and two, Skylab's orbit deteriorated faster than expected. A lot faster.
When a space station decides it doesn't like its orbit anymore, it's not a matter of anyone having to "allow" it to die - rather there's not much you can do to prevent it, just get the hell out of the way. Skylab was not Babylon 5, it had no maneuvering ability of its own, so once its orbit deteriorates enough, eventually the planet gets in its way and Skylab resembles a Lina Inverse fireball attack. We've since seen what happens when spacecraft crash over populated areas.
Now, Skylab was a rush job, we all know that, but it wasn't intended to be a permanent outpost in space - the plan was we would build better ones later after having learned from the mistakes we expected to make on Skylab. Skylab was intended to be the first, not the last, American space station. No one ever explained this to Nixon, apparently: the shuttle was supposed to be a pair with a new space station. Nixon OKd the shuttle but not the station. And it's been downhill from there.
Re:Report doesn't make sense (Score:2, Informative)
Such a thing has been designed and worked perfectly the first time. The one they used was even made for a Soviet Salyut capsule->shuttle docking, when the Nasa engineers hadn't even seen a Soviet capsule. They made it entirely from blueprints of the Soviet docking mechanism. Surely they can make a double-ender for shuttles that are in their own back yard and can be tested on.
Re:Any good space-station science? (Score:1, Informative)
Consider this: Ed Lu was the NASA member of the Expedition 7 crew that recently came back from ISS. After 6 months in space, he had 0% bone loss. 0%. That's the first time ever an astronaut or cosmonaut has spent that long in space an experienced 0% bone loss. The normal rate, without any kind of intervention, is 10% *per month*.
How is this significant? How the hell are you going to send a crew to Mars and expect them to do anything other than stare out the window if they are so feebled by months of weightlessness that they can't physically move due to Martian gravity? Granted, it's lower than that of Earth, but they won't have the luxury of recovery crews waiting to welcome them or long periods of time to recuperate.
Re:"Insightful" (Score:3, Informative)
- Clinton was asked "Did you have sexual relations with Monica Lewinski?" by the prosecutor
- Clinton asked the Judge to clarify and define the term "Sexual Relations"
- The definition given by the judge excluded oral sex, and concentrated on intercourse, consensual or otherwise
- Clinton stated the famous line
So he did not lie. His reply was within the definition given by the Judge, and is perfectly acceptable.Give me a break.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:3, Informative)
Uggh.
Ground-based adaptive optic telescopes are only marginally superior to Hubble in terms of imaging. Hubble is still superior for long-term integrations (much lower SNR in space than Earth and can hence observe much fainter objects) and spectra.
Spectra from Hubble don't have atmospheric artifacts that even the best adaptive-optic scopes cannot get rid of.
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:3, Informative)
Do you do any astronomical observations?
Having a larger aperature not only increases the angular resolution of your scope, but also increases the collecting area.
The first is very useful for imaging, in which case under certain ideal conditions ground-based AO imaging can achieve marginally better pictures than Hubble.
But the second implies faint observing, and the atmosphere still cuts the SNR of faint objects greatly. That is an area Hubble is superior in. Read about the Hubble Deep Field, for example. Ground-based observatories cannot keep the excellent SNR for a 100 hour observation (with breaks for lots of daylight) nearly as well as Hubble.
And for the n'th time, AO cannot take out atmospheric defects. Space-based spectra are (maybe in very few instances where high frequency-resolution isn't needed) superior
Re:We have heard form everyone but... (Score:3, Informative)
He used to be an astronomer (maybe he still is) so he knows the value of the Hubble.
Interestingly, he also said that he will go to Hubble, but won't go to ISS! Ie, he knows Hubble is more scientifically and technologically important than ISS.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:3, Informative)
...instead of putting those resources towards helping the existing small businesses grow. Homegrown jobs beat imported ones hands down.
You give Amalgamated Profits, Inc. a 10% tax break, they relocate their head office to your town. Your local economy becomes dependant on them - you become a Twenty-First Century company town. Ten years later, the next town over offers them a 15% tax break. They're gone. Your town is seriously fscked.
Re:The real justification for the Shuttle (Score:3, Informative)
The Saturn V carried a bigger payload.
The point of the shuttle was to go to the ISS. The point of the ISS was to have something for the shuttle to go to.
It was all about that Mars thing after the moon shot. NASA wanted to go to Mars, congress rejected the plan. They tried to do it in stages instead.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:1, Informative)
Second. When the US dollar falls, it falls against every other currency. Why, because every other currency is benchmarked against the US Dollar. It is the central currency in the world markets.
But to support your main point however, is that the further that this 'export' of jobs goes, the worse off the US economy will be. People won't be able to afford products, and since average salaries will be reduced, tax revenues will decline further increasing the deficit/debt problems.