NASA Approves Five More Years For Hubble Space Telescope (newscientist.com) 47
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: NASA has announced plans to extend operations of the famous space telescope for another five years, through to June 2021. That means it will still be on the job when its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launches in 2018, giving astronomers a dual view of the universe. "Hubble is expected to continue to provide valuable data into the 2020s, securing its place in history as an outstanding general-purpose observatory in areas ranging from our solar system to the distant universe," said a NASA statement. Squeezing more life out of Hubble means it will overlap with NASA's next big telescope, JWST when it launches in 2018. While Hubble sees the cosmos in visible and ultraviolet light, JWST operates in the infrared. The various wavelengths can reveal different aspects of stars and galaxies, so using the scopes in tandem will enable astronomers to study the heavens in even greater detail.
Re:Why set timelines? (Score:5, Informative)
Why not use it until it's completely broken?
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
[1]: http://www.space.com/20799-hubble-space-telescope-23-years.html/ [space.com]
Re:Why set timelines? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not use it until it's completely broken?
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
If the U.S. does not intend to keep it flying, then at some point we should really consider giving it away to another country, such as Dubai, which has expressed an interest in having a space program, so long as the thing has operational life left in it.
I suspect at some point in the near future, SpaceX will have the capability of performing a service mission to recharge the expendables, and update an instrument package or two. An inability to do that, for lack of a shuttle, is one of the primary driving factors in a shutdown/deorbit decision.
Hell, give it to Alphabet! They're interested in staring at nearby rocks they might want to mine, and can easily afford to operate the thing, an many of the instrument packages you'd use to look for rocks are good for another 40+ years.
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The limit for the telescope is more a question of when the gyros gives out and the fuel that is used to keep it in orbit runs out. Since the retirement of the space shuttle it's unfortunately a matter of time.
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"Space shuttle...I miss that bird. Hey, Mr. Trump, once you are elected, please fly a 'very last' mission to HST, bring her back home."
The Shuttle is long gone, which means that right now we have no way of sending another service mission to the Hubble. I would rather make it an X-prize private mission. It would be like taking one last try at keeping Grandma's Windows XP desktop alive.
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Maybe they should recover it and put it in the Smithsonian.
That would be the most expensive museum relic in the history of the world however.
Not just about science (Score:3)
Why not use it until it's completely broken?
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
It's not just about "how much science." NASA has had four missions that every child knows about, that have helped the agency and mankind a thousandfold more than the science we've gotten from them. That is because of the effect they have had at capturing the public imagination and inspiring people about science, about the quest for knowledge and exploration, about a hopeful future.
The Moon Landing.
Pioneer 10.
The Spirit and Opportunity Rovers.
Hubble.
The success of Hubble is not in its ability to generate s
Re:Not just about science (Score:5, Funny)
The Moon Landing. Great pictures.
Pioneer 10. Great pictures.
The Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. Great pictures.
Hubble. Great pictures.
But you forgot Vger. Great picture.
The Fappening. Great pictures (Score:2)
But you forgot the Fappening. Great pictures.
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Why not use it until it's completely broken?
Term limits. We've elected a new telescope.
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Why not use it until it's completely broken?
Term limits. We've elected a new telescope.
So, that means we have primary telescopes? Great. One sees stuff that isn't there, and the other can't see stuff that is.
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Why set timelines? Why not use it until it's completely broken?
To plan. Hubble could fail catastrophically tomorrow, tough luck now the money's available for other projects. For now though that's our planned operational costs, the rest for development. And that after that the budget is available for other things. Opportunity is still roaming on Mars after 5 mission extensions, if it actually lasts longer the sunk cost is so high we'll almost certainly extend the mission but we don't plan for everything to last indefinitely. Because that would be silly, that's why.
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Hubble has significant IR capability too, but not as deep into the IR
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This plague should have stopped bailing you out after WWI
Then we would by now be stuck with even more arrogant Germans dreaming up insane regulations, but this time with nobody to buy electricity from. At least the French have better cuisine.
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If the usa forces it's laws and culture on the world, then why isn't the rest of the world is more civilized?
The EU doesn't have nukes to launch, there nukes are under control of the UN.
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If peragrin forces an apostrophe on a possessive pronoun, then why doesn't he know that it's means it is?
Depends on what the definition of is is.
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This is an IR only scope because the most interesting things in the universe are either hidden by dust or are extremely red shifted and are only visible in infra-red. The entire telescope is optimized for IR. It wouldn't work well in visible light ranges.
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Re:JWST operates in the infrared (Score:5, Informative)
View all the light and decode it later.
It's really difficult to make all the light reflect & refract usefully thru a common optical chain. IR mirrors and lenses are quite different from visible light optics, and quite different again from UV & X-ray optics. The IR mirror in Webb likely has absorption lines in the visible spectrum that would "eat" the signal before it made it to the collector.
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Good explanation. Not all geeks are up on their science...decent replies like this should help them out.
Re:JWST operates in the infrared (Score:5, Informative)
Agh, what does that even mean? "View all the light"? Do you have any idea how things work? For example mirrors. There doesn't exist a material that can reflect all wavelengths of the EM spectrum. You are familiar with the common "silvery" mirrors right? While we can make them good at reflecting the visible spectrum (that's why there are is no color tinge in their view), the farther you go into IR territory the worse they get. If you are interested in the IR you can optimize a mirror for IR reflectivity, but at the same time you start losing at the shorter visible wavelengths. Have you noticed that the James Webb telescope mirrors are gold? The reason is they don't reflect blue! /. smart-asses...
So it is not a matter of sensors but of material limitations, you have to optimize your optical instrument for the EM range that interests you and it will suck outside of this range, so there is no point in adding sensors to record crap.
That's why engineers and scientists design these things instead of
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Blah blah blah.....I want some cool pics for my desktop. blah blah blah.
You'll get them. The most famous Hubble images are false color anyway.
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Translation: This is gonna be an IR-only telescope because we saved $1000 by not adding a visible-light CCD.
Because JWST has not yet launched, we could still spend that extra $1000 as a hedge against TMT not being built.
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JWT uses gold coated mirrors which are not very good in the visible, but very good in bands of IR that are very useful for looking through dust that block visible, among many other uses complimentary to visible telescopes. That costs a hell of a lot more than $1000 to swap out, being a large fraction of the cost of the scope itself, and swapping it out would make it overlap more with ground based scopes instead of using the space based platform for bands that are difficult to get on the ground.
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Its operational spectrum does extend into the red-end of visible light. The shortest light it is designed to observe is orange-red.
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In 2118 they will look back on our foolish attempts to reduce landfill, those golden repositories of resources just born for robot armies to scour.
We are stupider to compensate for 2118 life than 1900 would for 2016. Policies that slow tech dev are net murderous.