It's great Jared and the team at Polaris can help extend it, I hope Starship or similar will capture it and bring it back to earth, it deserves to be in a museum not end in a fireball
It's amazing to see a 32 year old chunk of hardware remain active and useful to this day. And projected to remain functioning for another 15 years.
While James Webb has become the new celebrity satellite, Hubble is still cranking out scans every week. It even caught some of the DART impact last week[1].
What’s more amazing is that the NRO has multiple more capable telescopes in orbit as we speak and we’re celebrating that NASA doesn’t have to spend money to keep that old piece of hardware useful for a few more years. Which isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but it just feels odd that priorities are shifted so much towards black projects.
> What’s more amazing is that the NRO has multiple more capable telescopes in orbit as we speak and we’re celebrating that NASA doesn’t have to spend money
I have zero problem with the NRO's budget or its existence and mission statement, undoubtedly its data products are proving extremely helpful right now in a behind-the-scenes way stopping the Ukrainians from being overrun by the Russian army. In addition to the well publicized equipment (HIMARs, etc) provided by the US and NATO states there is certainly a large amount of data on russian armor movements, ammo dump locations, logistics depot locations etc being funnelled from the US into the Ukrainian military command.
Just because a project or budget is black doesn't necessarily mean it's useless or nefarious.
In addition to the above of course NASA should have a much higher budget. I would like it if they could spend it on things that aren't flying pork barrels like the SLS. If they want to launch huge heavy things to orbit, designing something in two pieces that can attach together and using two fully expendable Falcon Heavy launches right now would be a tiny fraction of the cost. Not even counting the theoretical capability of Starship.
Theoretically the idea is you're supposed to elect trustworthy people with good judgment to the positions that sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and other persons in the US government who approve the budgets of TS/SCI and similar programs....
Something like the Church committee would be nice every decade or so.
Snowden showed they desperately need some light to shine on them once in a while.
Otherwise intelligence agencies have a historically consistent tendency to get a little too laissez faire with people's right.
NRO is probably the most secretive of all of them, but I'm assuming looking at pictures of Russian tanks and Chinese missile silos all day isn't the most civil-rights threatening thing vs storing billions of peoples emails, text messages, and phone calls like the NSA.
False, though common, misunderstanding of responsibilities. The NRO is the operator/owner of the space asset. The NSA is (one of) the customer getting data from the NRO space asset. (along with many other sources)
Though I would bet good money that a vastly greater percentage of what the NSA does for traffic interception, storage and analysis is related to terrestrial based networks (or terrestrial-to-local wireless like LTE) rather than space based, these days.
There are also two "Stubby Hubble" chassis sitting in storage because they're so obsolete that the NRO just donated them. However there is no budget to actually be able to use them.
If the famously secretive[1] NRO can just donate that, imagine how far ahead their newer stuff is.
Trump gave the whole world a good idea how far ahead the newer stuff is when he tweeted an image from an NRO satellite. Estimated at ~10cm/pixel resolution.
It will make you angry. Aside from the mirror fault, there were a number of operational issues that Hubble ran into that the TLAs knew about (e.g., solar panel flapping, radiation around the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly resetting Hubble's computers, etc.) . . . and didn't tell anyone because of secrecy concerns.
I'd love to see an xprize kind of award for design of a disposable, flat pack 1m space telescope. Get the unit costs down to <$1m (ground-based 1m scopes are $500k) and put 100 of them up into orbit and make time available for very low cost.
As this is operationalized you could incrementally increase the capability and specialty with each release.
I am pretty uninformed in this space, but would a swarm of smaller mirrors configured into a synthetic aperture work to make a larger scope? This could leverage mass manufacturing techniques to lower cost, be fault tolerant, etc?
For multiple individual telescopes to provide more telescope time, yes, but for multiple mirrors to act as one in the visible spectrum, it would be extremely difficult as they need to be aligned to a fraction of a wavelength. Maybe if they are mechanically attached to each other once in orbit it could work. See: ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomical interferometers.
There's already several companies doing that kinda thing for telescopes that point back down at earth. For telescopes that point away from earth I don't think anyone wants to do it because there's not much $$ in it.
I've seen at least a few startups try similar kinda things ("let's launch a constellation of cheap satellites and rent time on them out!") and they flopped hard. My favorite tried marketing as a "cryptocurrency in space" thing (LMFAO)
What would you be looking for exactly tho? What are the advantages - what could be studied in this way? One million dollars is really low for space ready equipment no?
I spent about 100 hours on a shitty 11" Celestron last year learning all sorts of things about space and optics and image processing. I'm hooked even though the results are terrible. I can rent time on some big scopes in high places, but the results are still subject to all of the artifacts and attenuation of the atmosphere.
Putting up a large number of reasonably capable space telescopes could be a tremendous boon to space education and even science. Look at atmospheric transmittance charts, there are entire areas of the spectrum that we can't even see from the ground. Having all of that research piled up behind billion dollar hardware pipelines doesn't foster a lot of attention or momentum.
Access for learning and education isn't going to ever pay for engineering and launch costs. Plus, if you're really interested in actual science, there's 30 years of Hubble images available to work through. Crowd-sourced science would be a lot more useful filtering through that back catalogue than coming up with anything new to look for that's visible by something with much less power than Hubble.
Disposable on Earth means sitting in a landfill. Disposable in space means burning up in the atmosphere. Ironically by not using disposable equipment you can end up cluttering the space even more because we still need to make advances.
With current space infrastructure, disposable is the only way to go while maintaining progress. As long as the hardware is optimized to fully burn up on re-entry it's acceptable at current scales.
For example, Starlink can keep unit costs low and focus on getting at least some functionality going while simultaneously working on next generation satellites. Since the satellites are somewhat disposable (expected to have an operating life of ~5 years), this approach doesn't lock them into a specific generation of satellites.
Eventually, we'll have enough hardware up there that it'll start being important to try to refurb/recycle, but that is not practical at scale right now, given that we're only starting to seriously explore things like mission extension vehicles, active debris removal, orbital refueling and satellite servicing.
Depends on the application. Starlink satellites are disposable (demisable). Not to say they shouldn't have stationkeeping to prolong the mission lifespan, just that there's no contingency servicing/maintenance plan if something goes wrong. They just return to dust.
We're going to have another Hubble up in 2027 if all goes well: the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or Roman for short. Originally known as WFIRST, it's a 1.6m-primary-mirror declassified Keyhole spy sat similar to Hubble, but with a shorter focal length and thus a much wider field of view (around 1/4 square degrees, roughly the area of a full moon). Still, its angular resolution will be comparable to Hubble thanks to a much higher-resolution, 300 megapixel imager. It's a visible/near IR instrument, so won't replace Hubble's near UV capabilities. Also, Roman won't have a traditional spectrograph on board. What it will have, however, is a novel coronagraphic instrument for imaging and spectrography of companions of nearby stars (brown dwarfs and gas giants in wide orbits -- still no imaging exo-Earths or even exo-Jupiters, alas).
“Digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to infrared light, which would interfere with the normal photography by confusing the autofocus calculations or softening the image (because infrared light is focused differently from visible light), or oversaturating the red channel. Also, some clothing is transparent in the infrared, leading to unintended (at least to the manufacturer) uses of video cameras”
I expect NASA to do the calculations, but I would expect boosting the orbit of an existing working telescope would be much cheaper than building a new one ANDALSO putting it in orbit. There are relatively few telescopes outside Earth's atmosphere; keeping Hubble running seems like a good idea.
It's also doing things like swapping out reaction wheels and dying hardware of various kinds.
And as soon as you're doing that, you're probably using humans. And then because the cost is already so big, you might as well replace some instruments, too...
To be fair, making a robot to fix a specific kind of dishwasher whose internal layout is known and where fixes involve replacing parts already meant to be replaceable is probably a lot easier than one that can fix any dishwasher. Same with sorting trash.
The big point here is that this boosting and potentially servicing mission isn't being pitched by NASA. It's a SpaceX proposal connected to their entirely private program to develop EVA capability for Dragon and to eventually test Starship's ability to support crews in space. Thus for NASA it would likely be cheaper than if they were asking for it.
So the reason we likely won't see a robotic servicing of Hubble (from this) is that it doesn't have as much relevance to SpaceX's goals with Polaris Dawn as just docking, orbit raising and maybe crewed servicing does.
Agreed, technologically you can make a robot that can fix a dishwasher that would be specially designed to be repairable.
But if you can't get dishwasher manufacturers to produce repairable dishwashers, then it's all for naught - we have failed as am industry.
Amd if you can get manufacturers to produce repairable dishwashers, then probably those dishwashers can be repaired by random joe opening a repairshop.
And its not clear why we need a robot.
Thats why our industry is a joke, we were promised robots will deliver our food, but instead robots micromanage indentured servants.
My city removed all plastic recycling bins several years ago in favor of using trash sorting robots after collecting mixed waste.
The robots could pick sort 70% effectively while the population of humans after years of training was stuck at 50%. I imagine the efficiency of the robots may even have increased a bit since then.
You missed crucisl detail- humans were sorting for free, owner of robots is paid.
Another crucial detail: producers of platic packaging engage is deliberate fraud to conflate recycleable and non recycleable plastic. Plastics that say 'commonly recycled' may be unrecycleable anywhere except a leading technology lab.
Another detail: massive fraud in recycling industry:
>Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely unskilled labor?
It's also proposed to be funded by Isaacman. Reading between the lines, he's probably planning to go to space personally and fix the Hubble. Which is kinda a vanity project at that point, but hey, I'll take it.
The original Hubble servicing mission where apparently more expensive than building and launching 3 replacements. Those missions where less about cost than actually testing repair capabilities and some publicity.
ALL shuttle missions were more expensive than launching 3 separate expendable missions. (on top of the launch costs themselves, the payload had to be 'upgraded' to human safety requirements. So things like deployment squibs had to be made triple redundant (instead of double) and had to be completely disconnected from a power source until released from the shuttle bay. (and of course, that power connection system had to be triple redundant... the complexity fed on itself) and that's before you get to the paperwork and the safety reviews... And you had to staff up three launch teams, instead of two... you needed a full team at Johnson in addition to the Cape and your own site. And the launch teams needed to be onsite for the full shuttle mission and rehearsals, and jerked around by the incessant shuttle schedule slips. The costs just kept piling up. )
It takes about fifteen years from concept studies to launch for a Hubble-class space telescope. I guess you could make it in ten if you just chose to replicate Hubble's instruments and if NRO had another spare Keyhole stashed somewhere...
The NRO donated two and parts for a third to NASA in 2012. One is apparently being used for the Roman Space Telescope, which would seem to leave another and a primary mirror of a third still unused.
Perhaps if we keep it in orbit long enough, robot technology will improve to a point where we don't need to send any humans to service the Hubble anymore.
Also, servicing the Hubble is exactly the kind of mission that commercial space ventures can use to showcase their tech. Relatively low risk, high media exposure. A pretty good practice ground, really.
By the time robotics advances to that point, it would most certainly be economical to manufacture a significantly more capable replacement telescope, wouldn't it? As far as I know, there isn't any particularly exotic materials in Hubble, it's just a big heavy precision manufactured (lol) object.
Even right now, it seems like the real cost of a falcon heavy launch is relatively low. We would get more science for the money by mass producing several higher performance telescopes with fewer reliability requirements.
A new hubble-scale space telescope is a multibillion dollar project - Hubble cost about $7 billion in 2022 dollars at the time of launch, JWST cost $10 billion.
By comparison, a manned servicing mission would likely cost in the mid hundreds of millions, or about 1-10% of the cost of a new telescope. It's unlikely that a one time injection of cash would buy much additional functionality for future satellites. By comparison, buying an extra few years before you need a proper replacement satellite would allow you to build a substantially better telescope at the same annual funding rate, or build the same telescope at a lower annual funding rate.
Things only cost that much per unit because they are one-offs. The trick to saving pots of money is to build duplicates, which will not incur research, design, tooling, test rig, etc., costs.
The other problem with these is the big super high quality optical mirrors. Going to a production line with those would be really interesting! I don't think you'd get a big enough economy of scale to mass produce them in a just-in-time pipeline though.
Once you've designed and built the grinding machine (I saw a picture of it, it fills a special room) you've done most of it. Same for the custom test rig.
SpaceX shows what happens to costs when you re-use designs and tooling.
True but there's also decreasing marginal utility for each duplicate. A second telescope in any given class would be awesome but it's always going to be less groundbreaking and useful than the first one.
Well if we had built a warehouse full of Hubbles, then launching a duplicate would make a lot of sense, but we didn't and now the cost of making a replacement after all the custom tooling and talent has been lost is just as expensive as the first time around.
The next gen space telescopes are already being planned. It just takes a long time to get them completed. In the mean time, we have a working telescope. We should just let it die and not be used while we wait for the next to come about?
Older telescopes can still contribute to science in parallel, too. Even terrestrial telescope time is booked years in advance. More scopes means more time for secondary pursuits, hands-on time for more junior astronomers, observations for more speculative theories, etc.
Of course, the cost tradeoff is quite different. All I'm saying is that a telescope, ground or space, does not suddenly become irrelevant because it's not the latest and greatest, so the expected value of the Hubble may remain positive after newer scopes are launched.
Each new space based platform also is built to see different parts of the spectrum. Hubble happens to be mainly visible. It is not irrelevant just because JWST is now active. To the contrary, they are combining images from each platform as a composite because they see different things for the same objects.
There would be no purpose of launching a new visible spectrum space platform unless it is going to seriously dwarf the size of Hubble. Hubble can already be upgraded with new sensors, and has. Which is part of the reason Hubble remains relevant. Hindsight being 20/20 and all, JWST learned from Hubble's need for contact lenses, which would be assumed to follow for whatever next is.
The proposed "better Hubble" that would launch in the 2040s is projected to cost $11 billion. That's a fair few servicing missions; it sounds like we can probably afford to do both, and if so, why not? Keeping Hubble around doing science longer is still useful even with a successor planned.
Since Hubble is at the upper range of LEO which made shuttle missions difficult, I've always wondered if they could make it slow down enough to lower its orbit more easily accessible for orbiters where part of the refurb is to refuel it so that it could get back to operating orbit.
Not to mention that NASA doesn't have the kind of blank check budget that the military has (by a longshot) — in a budget overview they may have to cut service for old projects to even get research on new projects funded.
when it comes to something like this you are forgetting the government redtape involved in building a new one is likely a bigger cost than the actual engineering building and launching.
Your stereo's electronics are also pretty well protected against radiation. That radiation has a habit of frying electronics (even rad hard ones) after a while.
Honestly Webb is way overhyped for what it is. Almost 8 times the mirror area of Hubble, three decades more advanced cameras, placed so far beyond any possible interference and it makes images that are at best twice as good and roughly at the same magnification. That photo of Jupiter was pretty disappointing in comparison.
With only limited yaw control and no articulation of any kind I was frankly surprised that it was able to see DART at all.
My understanding: what’s great about Webb is that it can take pictures in the infrared.
It has to be really cold to do this, hence the big complicated heat shield.
Infrared let’s us see things that are further away, because when something’s really far away it gets red-shifted down out of the visible spectrum into the infrared (due to expansion of the universe).
So it’s not really any better at imaging things that are close / in the visible spectrum like Jupiter.
You have to consider that JWST is working at much longer wave lengths than Hubble. So the resolution isn't much better than Hubble, if at all. Resolution of an optical instrument is limited by diameter over wave length. So despite its much larger mirror, it doesn't pull more resolution than hubble.
Where it excels at is, first looking at wave lengths so far invisible by any larger telescope. Hubble can't observe at those wave lengths and they are virtually invisible from earth, as the atmosphere basically absorbs any light at those wave lengths.
Also, it has almost 10x as much surface area than Hubble. So it will collect vastly more light than Hubble, as can be seen by the deep sky pictures available so far, taken in a fraction of time compared similar Hubble pictures.
The limited targetting control doesn't matter from a scientific perspective. There is a many years long waiting list for observations. During a year, the telescope is able to hit every spot on the sky, so the observations are just done in the order given by the telescope.
Ah fair enough, I hadn't considered the wavelength impact on resolution. That makes at least some sense.
> Hubble can't observe at those wave lengths and they are virtually invisible from earth
coughs in Spitzer
> The limited targetting control doesn't matter from a scientific perspective.
I would argue that it does matter in the case of specific events like the DART impact. Having it in its field of view was either extensive planning or dumb luck. I really don't see how it was too complicated to add one pitch servo, hell having a full robotic arm is even planned for LUVIOR.
They didn't create Webb to put better pictures as your desktop background. Saying it's "overhyped" because you don't understand what it's for is just peak internet, isn't it.
The media hyping people up for pictures of a scientific data collector that doesn't mean anything to most people is probably the definition of overhyped.
The point of the Webb telescope isn’t to take pictures! It’s to collect data. It can “see” way further into the early universe by examining infrared light, which Hubble cannot do.
I just assumed the general public isn't the main user of Webb. I figured infrared is more interesting to scientists than me. Why else would they have chosen that?
Maybe they'll figure out a way to translate the colours better for consumption.
We could have another dozen Hubble clones in orbit and they'd still be booked solid for years. It's just such a fantastic piece of kit, decades later. I see the value in servicing it, but I'd be even happier to see a few Falcon Heavy launches with modern versions of Hubble. In my opinion it's the least SpaceX could do for the brutal damage to the night sky Starlink has done.
The National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA a couple of unused KH-11s back in 2012, which is what Hubble is based on in the first place. They're using one of them for WFIRST, which is apparently expected to cost ~$4 billion, but that's the whole project cost including 5 years of operations.
It took a while for me to discover that truth about DSLR (SLR) lenses.
My attention was always on the camera and lenses weren't that interesting. Turns out the lenses last and the camera bodies are soon obsolete.
There are some exceptional they-don't-build-them-like-they-used-to lenses, like the canon 50mm f1.0
Of course with mirrorless you can use old lenses with a spacer, but now canon for instance is coming out with both r-mount and tiny m-mount lenses and you can gradually buy your collection over again.
(and there are still interesting things going on like the rf 85mm f1.2 normal and now DS model)
One of the big differences, however, with modern lenses is active image stabilization. Various "IS" and "VR" things in Nikon and Canon and similar lenses. Very important if shooting handheld and you want to take shots at slightly lower ISOs with less graininess in low light conditions, and for handheld videography with the same lenses.
The active stabilization many modern DSLR and mirrorless market lenses is worth a few f-stops difference.
It was a big deal last time and it will be an even bigger deal this time. I'm not sure they had planned for another service mission so who knows if they still have replacement gyros and hardware for it now.
Hubble is a bit old though and space is not very friendly, it seems like a risky mission but I guess the cost to service it today is cheaper than making a new one.
If the fairing was just a little bit longer on the Falcon 9 it could easily launch another one of these. But the dang thing cost $4.3 billion just to build and launch so I can see why they would want to repair instead of re-build. Especially since Dragon is so freaking cheap compared to the shuttle. However, outfitting Dragon for EVA would be a freaking PITA considering the certification process. More likely they would have to launch an EVA module separately that Dragon would dock to that had the necessary airlock to remove the need to depressurize Dragon.
I could see them designing a cheaper less dear version of Hubble now that launch costs are so much lower. But repairing it definitely makes a lot of sense.
Polaris are doing an EVA mission next year on dragon. There will be mods but essentially they're tethered by an umbilical and they'll depressurise the entire vessel
The question then becomes, how much does a portable airlock weigh versus a new satellite? What's the value of the airlock at the end of the mission? You're in the wrong orbit to send it somewhere else, you can't carry it back attached, and if you get clever and make an inflatable one to try to keep it small, how do you deflate such a thing?
The holy grail here is to figure out a way to not just boost it, but start doing some part replacement work on Hubble.
There's wonky computers, gyroscopes, and likely other parts that just need a swap out. Hubble is designed to let people do this. The only problem is that doing it today requires a person in a very bulky space suit that won't fit through the Dragon's door.
> The only problem is that doing it today requires a person in a very bulky space suit that won't fit through the Dragon's door.
Perhaps you haven't been following, but Polairs Dawn (the 1st Polaris mission) will be doing an EVA with a SpaceX designed suit. Part of the reason the suit can fit out of the door is because it's a tethered suit.
Assuming the tether is long enough, there's no reason in principle that someone couldn't use such a suit to work on Hubble.
Doesn't everything have to be designed differently on a space robot vs an earth one due to metal cold welding together and stuff? Just something I read about with the JWST gearing, maybe it only matters for something out there a long time.
The polaris dawn mission is planned to use starship, and will aim to do the first private EVA. And the hubble boost mission would also use starship. So it’s definitely a possibility!
> The polaris dawn mission is planned to use starship, and will aim to do the first private EVA. And the hubble boost mission would also use starship. So it’s definitely a possibility!
I think you're a bit confused.
Polaris Dawn is the 1st of 3 missions, and it will be using a Crew Dragon capsule.
The Hubble boost mission is the 2nd mission; I suppose it's possible that it could be using Starship, but there's no word so far that it's likely. Currently, the 2nd mission is planning on using Crew Dragon and docking to Hubble with a device located in the trunk.
It's the 3rd mission that's planned to use Starship.
The whole idea of this is that the government won't pay for it. Jared Isaacman has already done one space tourism trip on the dragon capsule, and has ordered 2 more dragon missions, and one starship mission. It seems he wants to be more than a Billionaire flying in space, and have a real impact. The next dragon flight is planning on being the first civilian spacewalk, the Hubble mission would be a successor with a likely spacewalk doing repairs/part replacement.
The extent to which this will have funding from NASA is likely to be limited to time spent by NASA personnel required to support the mission, whatever replacement hardware is installed, and a good chance of having a NASA astronaut along on the mission.
The unfunded part is the study. The actual mission would need to be bid out. Other companies could do their own study and make a bid. But I'm sure Jared Isaacman is eager to get the deal and will absorb some of the cost.
It’s only $67M for a Falcon 9 launch. NASA’s 2022 budget is $24B. Boost while you’ve got the political will, don’t pinch pennies and possibly miss the window to do so. Future expected ongoing science value is likely higher than the F9-Starship cost delta.
You're under costing it. A Crew Dragon mission is ~$287 million. That number is probably high because government orgs tend to have additional costs associated with launching for them above and beyond a typical commercial mission. But certainly much higher than $67 million.
> What is a reasonable adder to enable the ability to automatically dock and boost Hubble with a second stage using a stock first stage F9?
Not really sure.
But honestly, it needs a crewed mission. There's not much point to raising Hubble's orbit without replacing the reaction control wheels. And that'd basically require an EVA.
One key thing is that they realised how to fix the gyroscopes which kept failing, with the new design gyroscopes it can keep pointing, replacing those would require a crew.
- I would not count on it lasting long enough for Jared & Co. to get there.
(My impression was that gyroscope replacement was a "dedicated space shuttle flight and multiple EVA's" sort of job - likely a big reach for SpaceX / Dragon / Polaris, which have flown zero EVA missions so far.)
Edit: Sounds like the gyroscopes lasting long enough for Jared & Co. to get there is pretty sure. But depending on the design service life of the still-working gyro's - and a load of other critical items - 2037 is still a huge ask.
It should be possible to "fix" the gyroscopes by simply mounting a unit to the docking port or somewhere else on the exterior that contains a brand new gyroscope system, without needing to remove any of the existing broken gyros. It's probably necessary to make some electrical connections, but I guess it could even be possible for the strap-on gyros to have their own power electronics if that makes things easier.
This doesn't make any sense. L2 is 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth (4 times the distance to the moon!), while Hubble currently orbits at about 540 km. Moving it to L2 will make it much, much harder to service. Once we have technology to do servicing missions at L2, doing another one in LEO will be child's play.
If this is the very last service mission, pushing Hubble to L2 does make sense. More reboost missions will cost more than its current value. But if you just happen to have a Webb refuel mission in the two decades, you can add-on a Hubble service mission with very low cost and extend its value one more time.
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