[FPSPACE] Sky & Telescope: HST servicing a "no-brainer"

[DSFPortree at aol.com]

Relevant to earlier discussion.

David

Saving Hubble: A No-Brainer

by Robert Naeye, Sky & Telescope | October 31, 2006


As my colleague Stuart Goldman reported last week on his blog, Sky & 
Telescope has changed locations for the first time in 50 years. We are now located at 
90 Sherman Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about a kilometer (half mile) 
from our previous Bay State Road location. We are still unpacking boxes and 
crates, but we're starting to assume an air of normalcy and we're actually 
working on the next issues of S&T and Night Sky.

We also heard some very encouraging news today. NASA administrator Michael 
Griffin has given the green light to service the Hubble Space Telescope sometime 
in 2008. Citing safety concerns after the Columbia tragedy, previous 
administrator Sean O'Keefe had canceled the mission, which would have meant the death 
knell of the facility before this decade was out. But ever since Griffin 
assumed the reigns of NASA in 2005, he had given positive vibes about a fifth and 
final servicing mission, and barring catastrophe on an upcoming shuttle flight, 
I think it's extremely likely that it will happen.

The mission will give Hubble a new lease on life by installing new gyroscopes 
and batteries, which will probably extend the mission to about 2013. Better 
yet, the astronauts will install two new instruments that will enable entirely 
new science: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3. 

While I applaud Griffin's decision, this was a no-brainer. Independent 
studies have shown that flying to Hubble is only slightly more dangerous than flying 
to the International Space Station (ISS). But Hubble is vastly cheaper, and 
its scientific productivity has outstripped ISS to such a huge extent that 
comparing the two is about as competitive as a baseball game between the World 
Series champion St. Louis Cardinals and the S&T all stars. Flying this servicing 
mission is the cheapest way to add the equivalent of a new Great Observatory. 
And given the fact that there are no big space observatory launches on the 
horizon until the James Webb Space Telescope in 2014 or thereabouts, this 
announcement will come as particularly welcome news to most research astronomers. The 
fact that Hubble is still oversubscribed by a factor of 7 to 1 means it is 
nowhere near the end of its scientific productivity, even if no new instruments 
were being added. Most of all, Hubble is too important a scientific asset to 
let die in orbit while it remains a cutting-edge discovery machine.

Today's Hubble announcement overshadows another important development. NASA 
has just selected three low-cost Discovery missions for concept studies. These 
spacecraft, if funded to completion, will return a sample from an asteroid, 
study the chemistry of Venus's atmosphere, and map the Moon in detail to reveal 
its internal structure. These are exciting missions, so stay tuned!