WP: Plan to Abandon Hubble Challenged (by NASA engineers)

[DeepModem Mom]

Plan to Abandon Hubble Challenged
NASA Engineers Begin to Show How Telescope Could Be Serviced by Robots

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 12, 2005; Page A19


NASA engineers have taken a successful first step in showing they could service the Hubble Space Telescope using only robots, implicitly challenging NASA headquarters' insistence that Hubble will have to be abandoned because the controversial $470 million mission is too expensive and too difficult.

In an unpublished March 28 letter marking the end of a "preliminary design review" of the robotic proposal, review chairman Dennis B. Dillman, a NASA engineer, complimented Goddard Space Flight Center's Hubble team for an "extremely successful" presentation. "Congratulations are due for reaching this milestone in such short time," the letter said, urging "robust support" in "resources and staffing" for the Hubble team.

The letter was completely at odds with the Bush administration's determination to abandon the mission, and the Hubble controversy seemed certain to come up during Senate confirmation hearings today on President Bush's nomination of Johns Hopkins University physicist and engineer Michael D. Griffin to become NASA administrator.

NASA's Mark Borkowski, the headquarters program manager for the Hubble Robotic Servicing Mission, said yesterday that the agency did not intend to let a robotic servicing mission proceed and had allowed the preliminary design review to go forward "because the folks asked for the opportunity."

He also said some of the design work could prove useful in plans to send a spacecraft to dock with the telescope and eventually steer it into the ocean when it wears out. This project is regarded as essential to ensure that the Hubble does not come down in a populated area and will also give NASA new technology to allow unmanned spacecraft to rendezvous in space, useful in Bush's initiative to promote human spaceflight to the moon and Mars....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45041-2005Apr11.html

[crispini]

1. Good.

The waste of the Hubble is precisely the kind of thing that irritates the crap out of engineers. I'm glad they're pushing to continue working on it. :thumbsup:

[davidinalameda]

2. fantastic!

we need to save the telescope

[Skip Intro]

3. Do some want Hubble killed because they see it as a threat to God?

just wondering - it would fit right in with the fundie agenda, wouldn't it?

[Raster]

6. the proponents of american theocracy will do anything to discredit

legitimate scientific fact which shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Islamic/Judeo/Christian roots of our various religions are about as real and factual and relevant as the Jolly Green Giant and flying monkeys. Science encourages all to open their senses and question the traditionally held. In other words, science makes one think. Religions do the opposite. Oh religious proponents think all right, but only along rigid, proscribed lines. Religion IS the opiate of the common man.

[Griffy]

12. I think this CARTOON says it all!

I searched long for this.. and cant cut/paste pic...


http://www.politicalcartoons.com/preview.asp?previewType=download&imageID={D86D7400-34D3-4A25-BB09-C6CA04703A60}

[Skip Intro]

13. here it is. yep, very much what I was thinking

thanks.

http://www.caglecartoons.com/images/preview/{D86D7400-34D3-4A25-BB09-C6CA04703A60}.gif

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. I think there are two things going on with * space programs.

1. The only reason to support NASA is to get weapons platforms into space.

2. Hubble has to go, because it keeps looking farther and farther out to the edge of the universe, seeing the remnants of the Big Bang, and that is in conflict with the world being only 6000 years old.

I so hope they can save Hubble -- the most successful space initiative since Apollo.

[CottonBear]

8. You are exactly right regarding those two reasons.

I posted about Hubble and the creationists several months ago.

They are intent on shutting down any research that reveals the origins of the universe, earth and man. Bastards.

[fertilizeonarbusto]

5. We have to help these guys

Projects like this are what national greatness is partly about-not invading countries that have done squat to us.

[ixion]

7. way to go NASA eng!

:applause: :woohoo: :applause:

I think scrapping the Hubble is moronic, but I guess I shouldn't expect anything more from the 'Murikan Taliban. :eyes:

[madrchsod]

9. could it be this

http://www.enterprisemission.com/index.php
The Enterprise Mission---"a moon with a few"----

this is -very-interesting reading...

[ozone_man]

10. Keep Hubble alive.

After seeing the images from this telescope, I don't know how anyone interested in science would not support this. Send my tax dollars to Hubble not Iraq.

[brentspeak]

11. There's an even more sophisticated space telescope in the works

It'll be an infrared space telescope whose purpose is specifically to research the origins of and test theories concerning the Big Bang. Scheduled to be launched in 2012.

But its' optical range is only the infrared; it can't take standard fixes like the Hubble, which has a range from UV to near-IR. I believe the Columbia disaster has made some in the government reluctant to spend the $$$ to service Hubble.