Final Repair Mission To Extend Hubble's Life 125
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."
Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Insightful)
The kind of science we all need (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The kind of science we all need (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor celluloid film...
Even your retinas create images in a similar fashion, a collection of light hitting photo-sensitive receptor sites.