Hubble Space Telescope hasn't had any visitors for 15 years It is fifteen years since the Hubble Space Telescope was captured by a Space Shuttle for the final time. By the time its final servicing mission, STS-125, arrived, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) had already been in orbit for 19 years. Following the 13-day mission, the HST continued to generate prodigious amounts of science while …
It's going to end up as another Skylab, where NASA dithers about a reboost mission past its ability to stay in orbit.
Sad.
I know its no longer the latest and greatest, but there's been a lot of money and time spent getting where it is, and a relatively cheap reboost could extend that.
Not sure about "not the latest and greatest", because AFAIK the JWST observes on different wavelengths (right?), so we have nothing that matches what Hubble can do at the moment up there. Down here is problematic, the atmosphere is too turbulent, and some people seem to insist that putting lots of sattelites in LEO is a good idea.
For visible light everything modern is ground based as adaptive optics solve the problem of the atmosphere, and being on the ground means you can swap out the instruments to do experiments.
Satellite swarms are the only real problem, but nobody yet has a profitable satellite swarm so that problem might resolve itself in 10 years.
We'll see how well those weather the oncoming solar maximum. My understanding is that the solar storm this weekend is only a taster of what we might experience over the next year or so, as the solar cycle passes its maximum, and sunspots migrate towards the sun's equator, putting solar flares closer into the plane of the ecliptic, where Earth orbits. It would be terribly sad if, for example, Elon Musk's light-polluting Starlink satellites were to experience failures due to massively increased charged particle flux, or increased atmospheric drag. I can't imagine them (or many other unhardened satellites) faring well in the path of another Carrington Event. It would be terribly sad indeed...
I'm not sure I agree - working on the data is the sort of thing scientists can work on (or get funding to work on ) from many places.
IMO it is likely to be the infrastructure costs -- the ground-control management & staffing (technical and otherwise), the on-going ground-based infrastructure costs, transmitter/receiver time (&etc) that could (or would) be the difficulty.
You are right, I don't. But I'm paid - mostly - by research council funding. Even though I use data downloaded from NASA, as assembled from a large array of ground stations based in many countries and run by different organisations, and recording signals information from GNS, GLONASS, GALILEO and Beidou. Newsflash: all those infrastructure things cost money to run, but I can get and work with the data - all without paying for that infrastructure.
Exactly that. Voyager, for example, still retains a budget of about $7m each year to operate. It's a lot of wooden dollars though, as per your description of infrastructure costs - they all will be spent regardless, it's how you're apportioning out that cost to the usage of it.
Although we know have the James Webb in place it operates in the infra-red not visible spectrum. It is also not repairable due to it's L2 location.
A service mission would be a much lower cost than creating and launching Hubble II. It is a no-brainer that Hubble should be repaired until a major, and not repairable failure, occurs.
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They aren't taking about using a Falcon to do a retrieve mission. There is a rocket under development with a planned higher return payload capacity then shuttle had both for mass and volume.
The HST solar panels aren't designed to be folded away but I'm sure they can come up with a solutiom.
It is definitely not worth landing Hubble to refurbish it then relaunch.
Refurbishment is always incredibly expensive, and something would definitely get broken on the way down.
It'd be more cost effective to build and launch a new one.
That said, landing it safely to put in a museum might be worthwhile.
And reboosting it, perhaps as a ride-share with something small would cost very little.
NASA was offered an unused KH-11 which is a Hubble based spy satellite, if they wanted it, so there would be no need to refurbish Hubble. The KH-11 would need new instruments, corrected optics and launching, so by no means cheap, but certainly not as much as starting from scratch.
Something that can be configured to carry 100 colonists and their support gear to the Moon or Mars may have room enough to accommodate the Hubble.
Anything is indeed possible in science fiction, and any sort of space vessel that can carry 100 people plus equipment is still exactly that.
If there is any other intelligent life in the Universe then all these efforts wold-wide, offer us a little chance of discovering our future. I'm so happy and impressed with these efforts - all excellent examples of our intelligent human development ... when sadly compared to our worlds politics, spam, malware, and climate changes.
This video shows how hard it is to service Hubble. Its widely been published that Jared Isaacman is proposing using one of the Polaris mission to service hubble using Dragon capsule. Polaris 2 due to launch next month has a very basic EVA planned so at least they will have a better idea of what is going to be possible. Their planned EVA is 2 hours which is a fraction of what will be needed for a hubble mission. The suit only has mobility in arms, not waist or legs so there is likely more development needed there. Who knows but as Jared says, if nothing else gets approved then what have they got to lose ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKetXK4fskw&t=19s
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