Scientists Debate Robotic Hubble Mission 172
An anonymous reader writes "Some scientists are questioning whether the robotic mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is worth the risk and cost. After the Columbia disaster, NASA cancelled its shuttle mission to Hubble, and replaced it with a robotic mission. However, the price tag of the robotic mission is between $1 billion and $2 billion, almost the cost of a new space telescope. Optics expert Duncan Moore is unsure whether the mission will bring the most scientific return per dollar spent. Hubble director Steven Beckwith says the mission will lead to breakthroughs in space robotics."
Just do it (Score:2, Insightful)
1) The Shuttle is a waste of time and money. It should be grounded, and the remaining shuttles given to the Smithsonian.
2) The Space Station is useless too. Time to just declare victory in the War against low Earth orbit, and bring it down.
3) The replacement vehicles suggested for the Space Shuttle are scaled-up and enhanced Apollo capsules. We should just be buying Soyuz from the Russians. It works, it's safe. We'll never use it because it was Not Invented Here. Stupid. In case you missed it, I said not using Soyuz is stupid.
4) Going to Mars in the short term is dumb. GW Bush likes the idea, and that's a bad sign, because he's a fuck stick. But besides that, it's just too soon to go. There's a tremendous amount to learn by robot right now, and that's what we are doing.
5) So, we may as well save Hubble. It's not like we have anything else that is better to spend the money on.
Re:Just do it (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Yep.
2) Not quite, but we should finish the ISS using no more than 8 more shuttle flights, then all soyuz and USA/ESA expendable rockets. Hey, invite the Chinese to the party, too. Is it the INTERNATIONAL space station, or not? Snubbing the Chinese is a profoundly stupid thing to do; we'd be well served to have parts of the ISS coming up from China, Europe, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Canada, the USA, and anyone else with the mettle to fly vehicles there.
3) We should seriously consider buying soyuz from the russians even as we develop further launchers. Apollo had a -LOT- of things right, shame we scrapped it.
4) Going to Mars is only dumb if we don't plant roots there and establish a manned presence.
5) I wholeheartedly agree that hubble should be extened robotically. Worst case, we fund R&D for some kickass robotic technology that we can use elsewhere in space or even down here. The problem is that the max price for the robotic mission is projected at $2 BILLION (2,000 x 1,000,000). Sending a shuttle to fix it with carbon based units is a $900 Million proposition. I say take volunteers for a risky shuttle flight and fix it with humans, then spend a smaller budget on a robotic grand finale that would enhance hubble one last time followed by a remote controled electrodynamic tether that would bring hubble in to its inceneration.
Re:Critical problem with this argument (Score:3, Insightful)
And besides, it's science. Who cares whether or not the money gets spent on some piece of lens up in the sky.
If the Hubble gets repaired, the money spent on the robotics can be reused and the development will not go waste. But if we were to rebuild the Hubble, there is no real progress - we're just reinventing the wheel.
And another idea is the idea of organizing a contest on the redesign of Hubble -- cheapest guys get X% of the amount as the prize money. Or something.
Re:Critical problem with this argument (Score:2, Insightful)
We should outsource... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All science is good science (Score:5, Insightful)
While true, the real question if whether that $1-2b could be spent on doing better science. Of course, merely because $2b can purchase a new telescope doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to do a robotic mission if the science and engineering aspects involved are new and exciting enough, or if the robotic equipment could be used for future time/money saving work.
If its going to be a relatively routine job, then maybe its better to say a fond farewell to Hubble and build a new space telescope drawing on all the lessons learnt from Hubble's shortcomings.
What's the debate? (Score:4, Insightful)
- dshaw
Re:Why not contract it out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Critical problem with this argument (Score:3, Insightful)
I cant help but think that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look a story down at the hydrogen development... this could change the world on a much bigger scale than anything...effecting us right here ont eh ground right away. 2 billion can do so much good right here.
Yeah, I sort of hate the idea of not looking toward the stars even for a moment, but look around here, things are pretty messed up, and I dont like the dependence on gas and oil. 2 billion could go towards alot of infrastructure for hydrogen cars.
Re:Why not contract it out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when is it an acceptable project or endeavor only if a US space agency takes part? If it can be done by the Russians, good for them.
The sentence "It's good for science" isn't exclusively a US phrase.
Re:Why crash it into the ocean? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the stuff on it that's not expected to totally disintegrate has too large of a footprint and is statistically dangerous. The primary is going to come down as a big hunk of hot glass, propellant tanks will probably survive, as well as some other bits.
It's also cheaper to build a new telescope than it is to try to figure out a way to get the existing HST into a station in some other orbit.
Re:Why crash it into the ocean? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The propulsion module needed to deorbit is much smaller and therefore cheaper to build and launch than one to move it.
3) Moving it then requires keeping it in place and also repairing it, if it's to be useful.
4) After moving it, it would still be nice to be able to dispose of it once it's no longer worth maintaining.
5) You do realize there's a plan to put the replacement [wikipedia.org] at the (Earth-Sun) L2 point, right?
Re:Our eye in the Sky ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I work at NASA (but do not speak for NASA) (Score:5, Insightful)
Then when the price tag for sending robots into space is talked about people start screaming "Why are we doing that? Send astronauts instead! It's cheaper."
It is decisions by committee and it works in the same way as if you were driving a bus down a multilane freeway at the beginning of rush hour with a cloth tied over your eyes. Your only method of knowing what to do is what everyone on the bus is trying to tell you. So everyone gets to scream out what they want the bus driver to do and then he tries to react to the orders. And just like the bus - NASA is going willy-nilly down the freeway trying not to hit anyone, trying to apease each and every person on the bus, and to reach the destination each and every one on the bus is screaming at them to go to. It is a thankless, almost impossible task to perform.
The people of America need to realize just how stupid their over-the-top reactions to problems with space travel are. This isn't Star Trek, BattleStar Galactica, Star Wars, or any of the other truly great (IMHO) space shows. The physics alone are no where near the same. Yet these TV/Movie shows are what are held up as being totally correct and truthful. Further, when someone dies (as in Star Wars when trying to take out the Death Star) no one goes "Wait! Oh my GOD! Think about the insurance! Oi-vey! What about the children? His/Her wife/husband? Friends, relatives, and countrymen? Who's going to pay for all of this?" Everyone goes "Oh Wow! Did you see that? His head flew off into the window next to where Luke was trying to save Obiwan!"
So what am I trying to get at? The country needs to decide, once and for all, whether it is worth the lives of our astronauts to send people into space. If it is - stop complaining and start supporting that way of going into space. If it isn't - stop complaining about the cost and lend your support to the cause. The main thing is - you can't have it both ways. Either people are going to die up there or we are going to probably bankrupt the country trying to build a robot capable of doing everything a human can do.
And don't think that just because businesses are starting to get into the space business that things are going to change for the better. The problem isn't going to go away just because you've changed who is going into space. It doesn't work like that. You are still going to have people dying up there if you send them up there. You just will have more of them dying at one time. Just like in an airplane crash.
So come on America! Make up your mind! People or robots?
Re:Why not contract it out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gosh, everytime we have some sort of problem in goverment, why do so many people think that simply shutting down the goverment agency and handing out huge wads of cash to companies will solve it?
Look at what Haliburton did in Iraq. Arguable the Army Corp of Engineers could have done a lot of that work for less.
It will be years still before commerical interest and technology improvements will allow a non government sponsered agency to pull something like this off. I'm not discounting the amazing achievement of the SpaceShipOne people, but a short, suborbital flight was something NASA was doing back in the 1960's.
Someday technology improvements will push costs down to the point that something like this will be some kid's high school science experiment. But that is not today.
Re:I cant help but think that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and all the research money Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Rutherford, Bohr, Watson+Crick, etc wasted on mere 'science' would have better been spent perfecting metal bearings for carriage cartwheels, right?
Look a story down at the hydrogen development... this could change the world on a much bigger scale than anything...effecting us right here ont eh ground right away. 2 billion can do so much good right here.
Umm, you might want to take a look at the projects funded by DOE. Many of them are in the realm of better energy resources, including hydrogen power, as well as fusion.
I dont like the dependence on gas and oil. 2 billion could go towards alot of infrastructure for hydrogen cars.
Apples and oranges, 2 billion for funding 'hydrogen car infrastructure' doesn't necessarily have to come from Hubble. Besides, if Hubble were cut, chances are that the money 'saved' would just be diverted to Iraq or otherwise be lost in a myriad of other government pork.
Anyway, you're pretty short-sighted. Like I said before, if the world were populated with people like you, than today we'd have highly-optimized horse-drawn carriages and cobbled roads, without the money-wasting inconveniences of digital electronics, for example.
Re:Large Binocular Telescope (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, yet another post that assumes telescope resolution is the one parameter that determines which telescope is best. A quick analogy would be to claim which is better - a monitor resolution with 1024x768 at 24 bit color, or 3200x2400 resolution with 1 bit color. The answer, of course, is that it depends on your application.
Questions about this project:
- Adaptive Optics (AO) usually need a reference star nearby, or an artificial star produced w/ laser. What limitations will this produce in the images?
- How does this limit the area of the sky they can look at?
- What is the wavelength 'bandwidth' of the telescope, accounting for atmospheric absorption as well as sensor design?
- A good deal of astronomical science is done with spectra. What artifacts are introduced into the spectra through absorption and emission lines of the atmosphere?
- What artifacts are introduced to the spectra through artificial star for the AO?
- How long are the integrations that this telescope observe for? Hubble Deep Field was integrated for 150 orbits (10 days). Can this project integrate for a similar time, observing similar magnitude faint galaxies (sometimes individual photons), while maintaining a similar SNR?
- What is the limit for observing faint objects with this groundbased scope? Ie, the noise floor of a ground-based scope is much higher due to scattered 'light pollution', and it would be harder to see fainter objects.
So basically, image resolution is only one of several important factors and limitations in doing astronomical science.Re:Why not build a new Space Telescope? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I work at NASA (but do not speak for NASA) (Score:5, Insightful)
Shuttles, on the other hand, are politically irreplaceable: Endeavour was only built because we had most of the parts already, and the rest could be cobbled together for a couple of billion. Today there's no way to build a replacement shuttle cheaply, and with retirement announced in 2010 there's no point... it would get to fly a couple of times and then retire.
If a shuttle is lost servicing Hubble then you have only two left. One of those will usually be in maintenance, so that cuts your effective shuttle fleet by 50%. There's no way that ISS could be finished in that case.
Not that ISS should be finished, or should even have been started, in my opinion. But even a 1% chance of losing a shuttle and therefore losing a large portion of ISS upgrades is more than NASA want to risk.