It's official: no reprieve for Hubble

[unixronin]

NASA got a 2.5% budget hike for 2006, but none of that is for saving Hubble.  Out of the $16.45 billion budget, only $75 million is allocated to Hubble, and "all of that would be used to develop a mission for steering the orbiting observatory into the ocean at the end of its lifetime."  Everything at NASA now primarily "revolves around" President Bush's stated goal of a return to the Moon by 2020.

"NASA is working on ways to remotely manage the 14-year-old Hubble in order to keep it going as long as possible, and is considering launching two already completed Hubble cameras on a separate yet-to-be-built spacecraft," [NASA comptroller Steve] Isakowitz said.  "We have been as eager as the Congress to try to save the Hubble, but at the end of the day, what we're trying to save is the science related to Hubble."

And, in the end, you've got to respect that.  The science, not the hardware, is, after all, the point.

Comments

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

We'll just have to put a big-ass telescope on the moon...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's very technically difficult. It turns out that for a lot less money, we can put a lot bigger telescope on Dome C in Antarctica and get most of the benefits of an orbital telescope -- the seeing down there is much better than from any of the mountaintop sites in higher latitudes like Chile or Mauna Kea. If the planned Forty Meter Telescope, for example, were to be sited at Dome C, its observing and resolving power would be immensely greater than Hubble's.

Given an observatory at Dome C, the principal value of telescopes in orbit, in the short term, will be observations in bands that do not penetrate Earth's atmosphere. Further out, though, yes, I have little doubt that if we don't just forget about space as soon as it's out of the political headlines again, we will one day build some truly mammoth observatories on the lunar farside. It's a lot easier to build a truly gigantic telescope when you're building it in 1/6 gee.

Of course, by then I suspect we'll also be doing real-time synthetic-aperture interferometry across the entire width of Earth's orbit, or maybe even further ....

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

2020. Ha. Burt could do it by 2015 easy (presuming he makes orbit by 2010, which is the Bigelow Prize deadline), and make a profit on it. Here we go again with the boondoggles.

OTOH, the idea of launching Hubble cameras on new spacecraft, particularly remotely-maintainable ones, sounds good to me.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, I think we've already established that the government Doesn't Get It.