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1-gyro mode..... I am counting on how long can we keep Hubble up there, or how long until we need to put another costly service mission up there.
by Arkight 8y ago
1-gyro mode..... I am counting on how long can we keep Hubble up there, or how long until we need to put another costly service mission up there.
- maxnoe 8y agoIt only needs to be operational until the James Webb Telescope is available. As soon as this happens, most astronomers will jump ship anyway
- SiempreViernes 8y agoHa, good one! :D Like saying "it just needs to work until Longhorn ships" ;) In any case, JWST doesn't have UV capability, so it is not a straightforward replacement of what Hubble does. It just able to look at more distant objects because they've all been red shifted into the IR.
- baq 8y agocompletely different devices built for completely different purposes. there's nothing quite like the hubble.
- yholio 8y agoSure, but the jump is still tempting for the scientific top brass. There's only so much that can be learned in the visible spectrum and only so many Noble prizes, PhDs, tenures and grants to be had. Staying on Hubble is scraping the barrel when the new sexy JWST promises to open whole new fields of scientific inquiry.
- kamaal 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telescope.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telesco... Basically it will be launched in March 2021, if at all. By the way, every-time the launch year approaches they delay it by a good 2 - 3 years, and this has been the case almost forever.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoJWST and HST are not comparable telescopes. Moreover, the idea that astronomers would stop using one world class telescope just because another one (even a better one) exists is sheer lunacy. Even if a space telescope that was worse than Hubble existed it would still be completely 100% booked in terms of observation time, because there is much more demand for those capabilities than there is supply, by orders of magnitude.
- skrause 8y agoThere are no more Space Shuttles that could service Hubble. When it fails it will simply be dead.
- yholio 8y ago(Cut to Elon Musk, who begins to furiously sketch some plans on a paper napkin)
- stuaxo 8y agoIf someone else launches a similar mission, will he tweets that they are a pedophile ?
- melling 8y agoCut to Hacker News 4 years ago this month when I tried to make the case for sophisticated unmanned space exploration: “For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540712
- maxerickson 8y agoThe right thing to do would be to launch a bunch of new ones. (NASA estimated the marginal cost of launching a shuttle to be $450 million, which is going to be most of the cost of assembling a big telescope. Note that I said "assembling" and not "developing".)
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWould it be feasible if they "just" rebuild the Hubble with the original plans? I mean it's 30 years old by now but it's a solid device. That would save on development at least.
- londons_explore 8y agoRebuilding electronics from original plans which are 30 years old will be very hard. Components will have gone out of production, and minor design changes to accommodate new replacements will lead to a cascade of things which need recertifying.
- dredds 8y agoThe infrastructure no longer exists. The tooling no longer exists. Miniaturization makes old designs obsolete. Design is now the cheapest part of manufacturing. (See "Can we rebuild Saturn V in 2018") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhIfeS3OumY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhIfeS3OumY
- baldfat 8y agoIt took over 2 years just to make the wave mirror.
- thaeli 8y agoDOD transferred two "obsolete" KH-11 spy satellites (which are pretty much evolved Hubbles) to NASA in 2012. They've been in storage since. So the scope for a "new build Hubble" is putting instruments on those sats, launching them, and supporting the ongoing mission. That's still substantial, but much less than a new build from scratch.
- GTP 8y agoI don't know if NASA will ever plan to send a mission to repair it since it's already well over it's intended lifetime (by well over I mean several years which is a lot).
- baldfat 8y agoThe decay date for the Hubble is 2030-2040 so we should possibly get another 12 to 22 years.