Workaholic Hubble Telescope Will Eventually Burn To Death: Report

Monday, December 8, 2014

Workaholic Hubble Telescope Will Eventually Burn To Death: Report

Workaholic Hubble Telescope Will Eventually Burn To Death: Report:

The Hubble Space Telescope viewed by the STS-125 shuttle repair crew in 2009. Credit: NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope has delivered an amazing near quarter-century of science from all over the universe. Even this year, it’s delivered results to think about: the shrinking Great Red Spot on Jupiter (see picture below), helping New Horizons hunt for flyby targets after Pluto, and enhancing our view of deep space.

But that didn’t come cheap. Four astronaut servicing missions (including one to fix a mirror that was launched with myopia) were required to keep the telescope going since 1990. Hubble has never been more scientifically productive, according to a recent NASA review, but a new article asks if Hubble is destined to die a fiery death when its orbit decays in the next eight to 10 years.

“NASA doesn’t have any official plans for upgrading the telescope, meaning its hardware will grow old and out-of-date in the coming years,” reads the article in Popular Science. “Without assistance, Hubble can’t maintain its orbit forever, and eventually Earth’s gravity will pull the telescope to a fiery death.”

That’s not to say NASA is going to abandon the cosmos — far from it. Besides NASA’s other space telescopes, the successor James Webb Space Telescope is planned to launch in 2018 to chart the universe in other wavelengths. But a review from April warns that ceasing operations of Hubble would not be prudent until James Webb is up, running, and doing its own work productively. That’s a narrow window of time considering Hubble is expected to work well until about 2020.

The Hubble Space Telescope shows the shrinking size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in this series of images taken between 1995 and 2014. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)

The Hubble Space Telescope senior review panel submitted a report on March that overall praised the observatory’s work, and which also talked about its potential longevity. As is, Hubble is expected to work until at least 2020, the review stated. The four science instruments are expected to be more than 85% reliable until 2021, and most “critical subsystems” should exceed 80% until that same year.

The report urges that experienced hands are kept around as the telescope degrades in the coming years, but points out that Hubble has backups that should keep the observatory as a whole going for a while.

There are no single-point failure modes on Hubble that could take down the entire observatory. It has ample redundancy. Planned mitigations for numerous possible sub-system failures or degraded performance have been developed in advance via the project’s Life-Extension Initiatives campaign. Hubble will likely degrade gracefully, with loss or degradation of individual science instrument modes and individual sub-system components.

In NASA’s response to the Senior Review for several missions (including Hubble), the agency said that the telescope has been approved (budgetarily speaking) until 2016, when an incremental review will take place. Further in the future, things get murky.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field seen in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)

The just-tested Orion spacecraft won’t be ready to take crews until the mid-2020s, and so far (according to the Popular Science article) the commercial crew program isn’t expected to include a servicing mission.

According to STS-125 astronaut Michael Good, who currently serves in the Commercial Crew Program, the space agency isn’t looking into the possibility of using private companies to fix Hubble, but he says there’s always a chance that could happen. “One of the reasons we’re doing Commercial Crew is to enable this capability to get into lower Earth orbit,” says Good. “But it’s certainly in the realm of possibility.”

Much can happen in a decade — maybe a surge in robotic intelligence would make an automated mission more possible — but then there is the question of priorities. If NASA chooses to rescue Hubble, are there other science goals the agency would need to push aside to accomplish it? What is best? Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.

About Elizabeth Howell

Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

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UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Monday, December 8, 2014