Posted on 12/12/2004 7:52:14 AM PST by snopercod
Rescue missions expensive, ineffective.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Trying to save the famed Hubble Space Telescope with a robot would cost $2 billion with just a 50-50 chance of success, an aerospace research group is advising NASA in the coming days.
And that thumbs-down is likely to be preceded by another potentially negative finding from the National Academy of Sciences, due to report on Wednesday.
Both reports could spell doom for the popular, aging Hubble, whose fans have heavily lobbied to get it repaired to prolong its life and continue its stream of stunning and revealing pictures from space.
NASA requested the reviews of the National Academy and the Aerospace Corp., a California-based not-for-profit research group, in hopes that a robotic repair could be made.
An Aerospace Corp. summary provided to the academy estimates a robotic Hubble mission would cost $2 billion and would take at least five years to be ready for launch. By then there would be a less than 40 percent chance Hubble still would be functioning.
Less than three years would be needed to launch a shuttle mission to Hubble, for no more money and with the usual medium risk of mission success, the company said.
The full 100-page report is expected to come out this week or next, a company spokesman said.
In an interim report over the summer, a National Academy panel of scientists, aerospace experts and astronauts who have worked in orbit with Hubble urged NASA to keep its options open for one last service call by space shuttle astronauts. The panel did not rule out a robotic mission but noted its complexity and the technical challenges.
But NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe has stuck by his guns that regardless of what the academy or the Aerospace Corp. says, no people will risk their lives to fix Hubble.
On Wednesday, the National Academy of Sciences will issue its final report on the subject.
"These reviews have tended to reinforce NASA’s sense that although" a robotic mission "is feasible, it will be extremely challenging and will require very disciplined management," the space agency said in a statement Tuesday.
NASA will spend the coming year evaluating the robotic rescue plan and decide next summer whether to proceed. If nothing else, the space agency promises to launch a deorbit tug to guide Hubble down over the ocean - and not over populated areas - well before it would tumble in on its own during the next decade.
But it's OK for people to risk their lives going to that white elephant in the sky - the ISS...
Hopefully whoever replaces O'Keefe will make the right decision. The NAS has demonstrated pretty clearly that the emperor has no clothes on this issue. It's politics damning the Hubble, not science.
If O'Keefe had been directing "exploration" in the late 1400s, we would still be pondering a "safe" route back to the New World.
Hmmm.... maybe they should auction the HST to the private sector.
Not a bad idea...
(Assuming they're going to have a live camera) "What do you mean that's a torx head? It's supposed to be an allen head screw."
Nasa astronauts,
they were standing in line to go on a
joyride, but now, when asked to perform their
prime function...
chickens
Someone should replace the people at NASA with robots.
Dang fine idea! Dang fine!
Who owns the Hubble?
That said, I happen to know that just about any astronaut would have no qualms mounting up tomorrow and flying to the Hubble to execute the mission to repair it. The bureaucracy at NASA is incredibly risk averse to the point of lunacy (no pun intended), given their mission.
The Hubble telescope has done an incredible job over the years, and I fully support any effort to keep the scope online. I can certainly think of worse places for the government to spend my money.
Take a look at the picture above. (my apologies for the huge size of it...) Each individual point of light you see there is a galaxy. This picture was imaged by attempting to find the most "empty" portion of the sky they could find, and they pointed the Hubble there for a while to see what they could find. The result is the incredible image above. Kinda puts our place in the universe into perspective eh?
When one sees that picture, there is no way in heck that we are the only living beings in this universe. To think otherwise is wrong..
That's funny.
And I never knew Russia sent a probe to Venus.
What did the Ruskies conclude?
"Ve have a major announcement as result of our test results from the Venus probe: The surface of Venus is made of plastic."
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