NASA returns Hubble to full science operations
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
Reminds me of strategy games where feeding enough “science units” into opaque “research labs” unlocks branches of the technology tree.
What's the proper unit of measurement to quantify how much "science" they've collected, anyway? Bits?
NASA had an outage 350 miles above the surface of the Earth and managed to fix it.
There's a difference in software reliability priorities and operations here.
[0] https://softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/sscl/moglen-software...
My back yard rain gauge is not sciencing either.
I suspect that pretty much everybody who does experimental physics, a whole lot of astronomers, and a multitude of other observational scientists might like to have a word with you regarding the scientific method.
But that could just be me.
Independent people have and can discover the same truth while in religion everyone who invented one, believe in something different.
Science is universal. Religion is stupid.
Religion on the other hand can have true statements because they are deduced from a priory axioms that a matter of beliefs. For example, given some axioms about God, one can deduce that the world is such because God is made it so. This will be similar to Banach–Tarski theorem [1] which is true as long as one believes in the Axiom of Choice. But such statements are not a scientific theories precisely because it is not possible to design an experiment that will disproof them.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
That should be doable right?
Or what would be a better description on what science make unique and better than religion?
It can only explain things inside it's belief system.
If you haven't encountered this kind of fanatic, consider yourself lucky. These days I'd feel safer drawing a picture of Mohammed than blaspheming The Science by asking heretical questions or making unholy observations. You never know when the secular-inquisition will come for you, but you always expect it.
No, religion cannot explain anyrhing reliably as it's based on dogmas and not facts.
In the meantime, I recommend the book The Evolution of Religion by Robert Wright, a very sane author that's written a lot of great books, in my opinion.
No, building a reality based on a dogma is the most close-minded thing you can ever do.
There really needs to be a term for this widespread inability to differentiate between 'the science' as in the correct application of the scientific method to arrive at empirical conclusions about the world around us and 'The Science' as in the socio-political institution of various experts and technocrats. One is a powerful tool in humanity's toolbox for getting shit done, the other is subject to all the fallibility of human social institutions - perhaps even moreso because people will blindly trust it meaning there's fewer checks on it than other social institutions. Usually people going up against 'The Science' are cranks which means there's a tendency for people to believe anyone who goes up against the status quo is a crank.
You see this in commentary about climate change, people blindly trust 'The Science' to fix everything in a glorious deus ex machina without the tiniest scrap of evidence 'The Science' even has the power do to such a thing in one fell swoop. That's not saying we shouldn't pursue efforts like geo-engineering etc but we should at least keep things in the realm of what the current scientific evidence is saying which is we need to heavily cut our emissions no matter what rather than relying entirely on speculative mega-projects.
Ultimately you should never trust anyone who claims to have a monopoly on truth or that $group or $profession has a monopoly on truth.
The issue is that, at least in the US, it has become politically advantageous to claim that the socio-political institution of 'The Science' has given its imprimatur to the policies they wish to enact. It's advantageous to combine the institution with the process, so why would anyone stop?
Couple that with a media environment that seems fundamentally incapable of reading beyond the headline of any scientific publication, and the proliferation of p-hacking and less then replicable studies being churned out by academics who need N articles to have a chance at tenure this decade and...you get a situation where 'The Science' is whatever a bureaucrat in a lab coat says it is.
It also makes me think of Portal: "And the science gets done, and we built a neat gu--er, telescope..."
Or Scully babbling on about "the science", referring to some MacGuffin or other during the later seasons of the X-Files.
Talk about inspirational.
(NASA’s Curious Universe podcast is running a JWST series right now and this came up in a recent episode).
The parent comment was just that it would be cool to bring Hubble back eventually, and that Starship seems promising towards that end. It's not a diminishment of all other space-focused organizations.
Dragging a specific method of accomplishing that into it was kind of unnecessary from GP.
Without pointing out that it could theoretically be done (that rocket isn't ready yet, and may never be), the assertion that it should be done is seriously devalued.
I think it's warranted when we're, say, comparing the costs of SLS vis-a-vis something like Starship but it's really silly to constantly suggest SpaceX and other commercial space entities are some sort of savior figure for space exploration. I think it's actually a cautionary tale of again sacrificing a commons (space) for the sake of profit.
Why are you getting hung up on Starship being the current best choice for a return mission at Hubble's EOL? If I was making the comment in 2010 I'd've said returning Hubble is worth the cost of a shuttle launch. If Hubble miraculously lasts another decade I'll make the argument returning it is worth the cost of whatever vehicle is best suited at that time, possibly if unlikely a vehicle coming from the France 2030 development drive.
Why?
"It will cost you 1 billion to launch 100 tons to orbit"
or
"It will cost you 100 million to launch 100 tons to orbit"
or
"It will cost you 10 million to launch 100 tons to orbit"
Guess which one of those is going to 'save' space exploration? Not only that, cheap launches will massively increase the size of the market giving all those good little boys and girls that are interested in space a chance of getting a job in the market. NASA is the market too. If they can drop launch costs 10x, they can launch that much more science.
The space market has been dead for years, it's time to bring it back to life.
Keep your fantasies about my emotional state to yourself. I meant precisely what I wrote.
> religious feeling
I'm well aware of it, but it's not the basis of posts to HN. Such religions - cults of personality - inevitably do a lot of harm to society and the followers. Musk, of course, will make out very well.
Zealousness never has paid off; its purpose is to override reason and good judgement. How can that turn out well? Why would Musk want to encourage that, unless there is something to hide?
> I don't know of many companies that succeed at this level.
It's success to manipulate people? Apple and Steve Jobs succeeded in having an enthusiastic following without narcissim, setting a good example, without manipulating the followers, without undermining and harming others, and without undermining, apparently intentionally, the rule of law. Disney I think is the same.
Look at the number of views the falcon heavy double booster landing got. It’s entirely irrelevant to science but it’s still inspiring nonetheless.
Why does that matter? People without a 4 year+ degree in physics need to be inspired as well because statistically they are the ones who make the decisions.
SpaceX at least doesn't appear to be building a business model based on being a barrel for pork with a board that functions as a pension fund for military generals.
From my comment, you didn't suppose I believed government space capabilities and projects should be entirely shut down, or that they should be left to old space companies to continue extorting taxpayers, did you?
Providing a service to the government is not a problem. This is not some kind of libertarian purity test I'm concerned about. It is about ripping off tax payers with lobbyists and the military industrial political revolving doors.
I mean it really is a pretty bad question because you've not taken even 60 seconds to learn the first thing about SpaceX
It isn't.
> There isn't enough history yet to compare them fairly.
I compare them on what they provide for what cost right now, and the kind of company that they appear to be building as of now. Hopefully it was clear that I wasn't making predictions about the future.
Yes, that is how they fund their operations. No one else is giving out billions of dollars to build rockets.
At the same time they are using that money to
1. Create full reusabilty.
2. Drop launch costs 10 to 100 fold.
3. Massively increase payload and launch capability.
Which is the point of this particular thread. The other launch groups have pocketed (hundreds of) billions of dollars and changed almost nothing over the past few decades.
Maybe SpaceX does, maybe it will. But providing launch services to the military and undercutting the companies that definitely do those things is not a problem to me. This wasn't a military = bad rant.
Who said it did? I'm not sure what you are responding to.
However, working with an entity that perverts merit-based decision-making with public pressure could certainly be harmful, and Musk acts by manipulationg the public. Other NASA partners don't do that. The Europa Clipper, for example, will take years longer to reach its destination - a critical milestone that will delay the exploration of life on Europa for years (if I understand correctly)- due to being switched to a SpaceX launch. It was switched for technical problems later determined to be meritless.
The vibration issues were also very real.
Presumably the OP thinks of them what they wrote about them in the comment - that they explore and inspire.
To address your later comments as well, there was no specific promotion of SpaceX in the OPs comment, no implied criticism of any other space tech company or reason to believe the OP thinks anything but good things about them. Just a space enthusiast enthusing about space. But no, you have to turn it into an argument.
Maybe we should inspire people by doing useful science instead.
I assume anything remotely still classified would be ripped out, so probably only the big (outer) shell would end up in a museum, maybe some of the outdated computer boards.
It's still inspiring, but would it be more fair to go to Florida? Texas? Some state where it was built (if it weren't those)? The Smithsonian?
Nothing on it is modern enough to be classified, if it ever was classified. It is really old. DoD had better optics flying in space… by the time Hubble launched, maybe?
I'm excited for Dec 22nd when the James Webb launches. Crossing fingers big time.
Probably a moot point though: by the time we can get people out to do such an operation, I suspect a reduction in launch costs might lead to a much cheaper space telescope you could just drop off instead.
If all goes as planned, the limiting factor is propellant. And the propellant tanks have the ports for on-orbit refueling, in case there is ever a desire to develop a robotic servicing mission for the task.
(In other words, how expensive would be fixing an issue and trying again actually be?)
In general it's uncommon to build a replacement satellite after an issue. Either you make a backup from the start, or you start over after failure. Making a one-off component often isn't all that much simpler just because you've already done it once a decade ago (and some parts of the JWST should be about a decade old by now). And if you commit to doing that all over again, might as well update the entire design to new capabilities and requirements.
1: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/48902/are-there-an...
This launch is going to be so scary as it represents the scientific promise and investments of a generation.
It's proven itself an absolutely invaluable tool for research, but I think the even more impressive mission Hubble has shown itself as irreplaceable for is stimulating the public's mind for science and exploration. There's nothing like seeing photos of the universe in visual-light spectrum and thinking, "what if we went there?"
JWST is amazing and I'm so glad it's finally launching but for that second use case, it trails Hubble.
Maybe with the new options it becomes cheaper/ more viable.
Some people do, and erroneously conclude that "space is fake". This would be laughable, if not for the part where they then persuade their friends and family to feel deceived. Artificially coloring images without disclosing it clearly upfront in a highly visible manner, ideally with some sort of watermark on the image, is the sort of white lie that contributes to the public's growing distrust of authority.
Yes, I know the caption below the image usually disclaims it. But as you say, most people don't notice or know it until somebody points it out to them, and too often the somebody who points it out is somebody who's peddling nonsense of their own.
Then these detections are put together into a false-colour image so we can visualise it. We have three narrowband filters, so it makes obvious sense to map them to the three primary colours in the image.
It's not about using weird filters on the telescope to make "doctored" images that look impressive. It's about using weird filters on the telescope to collect the best science possible, and then using that data to make an image.
For the near term it's always going to be cheaper to launch replacement satellites instead of servicing broken ones in orbit.
Constellation was the system that was supposed to succeed the Shuttle. It had one successful first-stage launch in October 2009. In 2010, Constellation was cancelled by Congress (at the behest of then-president Obama). In its stead, Congress essentially designed a new rocket called the Space Launch System, and tasked NASA with building it. Constellation's crewed capsule, Orion, survived as the SLS's crewed capsule. Unfortunately, the SLS is now 5 years overdue for its first launch. (It currently seems reasonably likely to launch for the first time in 2022.)
The Orion capsule could conceivably service Hubble [1], especially after lots of launches and general experience with the vehicle. If Constellation had not been cancelled, or if Congress had tasked NASA with a less-ambitious rocket to build, (or if the contractors that NASA was obliged to use to build the SLS had been able to keep to the original schedule,) we might have had a spacecraft to service Hubble right now.
It’s pretty much on borrowed time. I think they spent most of that outage trying to bring the main up and gave up.
Must be fun troubleshooting something at like 400 km orbit. Heck I had to tell a lady she couldn’t wfh today because her cell data tethering wasn’t up to snuff to hold a connection to our vpn or do much of anything. She was seeing spurts of 10% loss on downstream and 200+ ms latency.
https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-opportunities-and-policies/...
Just a guess. I could be wrong!
According to Wikipedia, the order is: Sun, L1, Earth, L2. So L2 is always in the night sky.
I don't see issues with focus. 1.5M km is effectively infinity. Indeed for my camera on earth, 10m resolves as pretty much as well as infinity, f stops notwithstanding.
JWST is about 20m by 14m in size. And it's out of the earth + moon shadow because of the nature of its orbit. It has a sun shield, and radio dish in the shield.
The resolving power of 0.05 arcseconds at 1,500,000 km apogee is indeed 350 m (ish), which is much bigger than the JWST. The situation is worse at perigee. An image of JWST would take up less than 1% of Hubble 'pixel'. So there may be a faint blob, depending on the albedo of the JWST. (I don't know how Hubble's the photodetector arrays' resolution compares to the maximum resolving power of the lens.)
However, Hubble's guidance systems have permitted astronomy at 0.0003 arcseconds, which comes out at a little over 2 m at JWST's range. So after a lot of computation, stacked images and fine-guidance shifting, presumably there could be an image of around 10 x 7 pixels (or whatever they are after the computation).
And that's a result!