linkage
I first want to say that I think NASA could use more funding, but it is time for them to stop being wasteful. Okeefe was right to kill hubble, but the uninformed public outcry was too much.
We could probably fix the hubble, but the question is why?
I first want to say that I think NASA could use more funding, but it is time for them to stop being wasteful. Okeefe was right to kill hubble, but the uninformed public outcry was too much.
Moreover, "Space News" reported on August 13 that NASA's official $1.6 billion is actually its private minimum cost estimate for the repair robot: "An internal NASA study completed in recent weeks, according to government and industry sources, [/b]estimated the cost of such an undertaking to be $1.6 billion to $2.3 billion."[/b]
And any such servicing mission - manned or robotic - has a 50-50 chance of prolonging Hubble's working lifetime by only another 3 1/2 years.
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And one of those concepts was the Hubble Origins Probe ("HOP") proposed by Colin Norman of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble.
HOP would fly the WFC-3 and COS instruments- intended for installation on Hubble- on a new orbiting space telescope, in a similar low Earth orbit, with a 2.4 meter mirror just as big as Hubble's.
But (like the other Origins Probe ideas) it would cost less than $670 million, thanks to the major cost-saving advances in technology that have occurred since Hubble itself was built in the 1980s.
(For instance, the European Space Agency's "Herschel" infrared space telescope, set for launch in 2007, costs only about a billion dollars and weighs less than one-third as much as Hubble - but it carries three instruments, and its mirror is almost half again as wide as Hubble's and has over twice as much light-collecting area.)
And the cost of each generation of new replacement instruments on Hubble itself has dropped at the same time that their data return has literally skyrocketed.
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So, at a total cost of a little over $1.3 billion - the same or less than the proposed robotic or manned Hubble repair missions that would renovate the telescope for one final lifespan of 3 1/2 years - [bthe same four primary Hubble instruments could be flown and operated for a comparable period on two new orbiting telescopes.
We could probably fix the hubble, but the question is why?