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)
No way (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No way (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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From the XKCD Store page [xkcd.com]:
Re:No way (Score:5, Funny)
What does "devian" mean?
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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.
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It's an appeal to authority argument, which means it rests on how well you think Nobel Prizes in physics correlate with the importance of the physics. For myself, I'd say the correlation is not as strong as one might like, but it's moderately strong.
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Furthermore, using the Nobel prize committee as an appeal to authority is blatantly fallacious when you consider they gave the peace prize to a hypocrite.
The selection of the Nobel Peace Prize is made by a different body in a different country, completely unrelated to the body that selects for the scientific Nobel Prizes. I get the impression that their selection criteria are radically different. Those who select for the peace prize seem to use the prize to try to give increased influence to people who they hope will use this increased influence for peace work. Something like that. To me that policy seems terribly self-defeating in the long run. The scienti
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It's kind of lame to be arguring about which major result in astronomy is "more signficant" than another. It depends on your own evaluation criteria and interests. COBE did a great job on one very important question. Hubble has done a great job on hundreds of o
Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
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Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Informative)
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> 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)
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.
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Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Interesting)
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: 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'.
Re:Other than the Apollo missions... (Score:5, Funny)
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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'.
Actually, this is exactly what NOT to do, and NASA/JPL do not do it this way. You do actually WANT to burn away a significant portion of a part's usable life before putting it into space. Basically, you're trying to chop off the beginning of the bell curve; some of these devices have very short lifetimes, and you want to make absolutely sure you eliminate them. Once a part makes it through a certain point in its usable life, you know to a high degree of probability that it will last for quite some time
We all know when the end will come for hubble (Score:2, Funny)
: "The hubble telescope."
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Assuming we overlook the fact that the majority of the costs for Hubble were from flying it on the Space Shuttle, then I will agree that it is a NASA success story. Otherwise, I think it is a decent PR success for NASA but poorly executed from the beginning (aka when they decided to launch it on the shuttle). I thought I hard something like up to 6 Hubble's could have been launched (5 blown up) and we would have the exact same functionality as the current one, as long as we used an unmanned rocket. As m
Aging gyros? (Score:3, Funny)
(Yes I know it is bad.)
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[I know that insolation will raise the temp, but I thought it was funny].
The kind of science we all need (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The kind of science we all need (Score:5, Informative)
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Nor celluloid film...
Even your retinas create images in a similar fashion, a collection of light hitting photo-sensitive receptor sites.
Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Opaque to UV? (Score:2)
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Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Quick mod him +5:Informative!!!! Oh wait too late. Never mind.
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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.
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Re:Advantages of Hubble still worth it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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We do have technology for balloons and blimps. Note that people would live inside the buoyant gas and breathe it. But certainly lots of challenges related to this remain unanswered -- as I already said in my post.
You sound angry or something. Don't be
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Would you agree that with enough funding we could probably establish a foothold on Mars or Luna with existing technology?
No, I don't agree. Not with existing technology. New technology will be needed. But I do think that this new technology is within reach. I do think that with sufficient funding we can very likely solve all the inherent problems, although I do think that some of them are quite formidable.
Maybe that was exactly what you meant and I'm just being more pedantic.
Can the same be said about Venus?
I don't yet have enough information to judge that.
Before yesterday I found every non-science fiction, seriously intended idea about deploying people on
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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?
If we could reliably do this, you would have heard about it. Adaptive optics (AO) is great, but its primarily useful in infrared, not visible. Lucky Imaging (recently deployed at Palomar) is supposed to correct for this, but from what I understand, requires pretty long exposure times to get enough data. Its useful, but we'll have to see how it develops. AO is definitely a way to help control some of the problems with ground based telescopes, but not all. AO infrared images have about as much resolution as
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After replacing the aging gyros ... (Score:5, Funny)
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- RG>
Do it to it, buddy (Score:2)
I wanna see Hubble... (Score:2)
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Also, it would make repair a major bitch...
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However, putting it in a lagrangian point would sure be a "put up or shut up" move when it comes to saying that this is the last, last repair mission.
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Why? You want radio telescopy on a grand scale? How about a radio telescope with a 40,000 km edge to edge diameter? But the
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How many people wanted to fix it? (Score:1, Troll)
Will it really be the last trip? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
They seem to be thinking ahead, almost like it was their job or something. : )
Sure brings (Score:3, Interesting)
hue / hew (Score:2)
Color or shade of color; tint; dye
hew
to complain about
(in before "there are no editors")
AMS? (Score:2)
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)
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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!
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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
AMS can be saved, just like Hubble. (Score:2)
Then get your friends to send emails and the like. You can use wikipedia for the links to your own Congressmen. You might try writing into the opinio
Why are the gyros failing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are the control electronics associated with the gyros failing? What gyro technology are they using?
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Part of the ISS? (Score:1, Interesting)
Is there anything fundamentally incompatible with the design of the Hubble and the ISS? (orbit, need to rotate, etc.?)
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Several alternatives are considered in those
I gotta know - what science exactly, does Hubble (Score:1)
From what I know of, most of our useful scientific advances from the space program have been because of trying to get out into space. I honestly don't know of a single advance made from actually being out there. We know a bit more about the planets surface, and that there aren't any living sentient beings in our region of space. However, we also know that its hugely impractical to relocate to these planets as well, and that
Invoice (Score:4, Funny)
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Still alive! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
It goes without saying (Score:2)
Just like the car talk guys say... (Score:2)
(He says after getting a new radiator for my 1995 Saturn Station Wagon.)
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Its really good that Hubble isn't going to be abandoned, I hope she can last until then.
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Not a waste (Score:2)
I disagree. If the Hubble could be brought back and put in the Smithsonian, then some child might become inspired by seeing it up close and personal, and choose to pursue science, astronomy or space exploration instead of choosing to grow up to become an advertising marketeer, scam artist or drug dealer.
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And what's a PI? Is it because English isn't my first language that I don't know what a PI is?
I don't understand COS or WFC3 either, but since you said they are in the summary, I'll trust that reading the summary gives me the same information.
Checking both your post
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PI is principal investigator
COS is Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
WFC3 is Wide Field Camera 3
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