Boston Globe Editorial: Hubble in Hand

THE HUBBLE Space Telescope has earned its place in the universe, and NASA should keep it there for as long as possible, or at least until 2011, when its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled for launch. The space agency, forced to reassess its mission in the shadow of the Columbia disaster, is considering whether to close the fabulous eye in the sky in its prime. That would be unconscionable given the worlds Hubble has opened since it was launched in 1990.

"I've been able to study exploding stars," says an irrepressible Robert Kirshner, who specializes in the field of dark energy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge -- a field that didn't exist when the Hubble was built.

He notes that the beauty of the telescope is that it grew and changed along with technology, that it "was like a new observatory several times over" despite its inauspicious start before a team of space-walking astronauts gave it "contact lenses."

Hubble has provided data for nearly 3,000 scientific papers, taken a half-million pictures, measured the expanse and age of the solar system, discovered planets, and probed the secrets of Mars.

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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2003/08/22/hubble_in_hand/

We would have never been able to see images like this:





If we can spend a billion a week to destroy Iraq, why can't we afford to keep Hubble operating?

Especially considering that we all know what "scheduled for launch" means. They'll be lucky to get the replacement up by 2015, and if they shut Hubble down there won't be anything. That's a lot of astronomers finding other jobs and then just laughing when NASA asks them to come back to work.

will be an infrared space telescope; the Hubble works in the visible and near UV. The two make different types of observations and are complementary; each can do science that the other can't.

Accordingly, it would be a good idea to keep the Hubble operating until it can be replaced by another visible-wavelength space telescope.

Also: the Webb will NOT be in low earth orbit; if anything goes wrong, or if it has optics problems like the Hubble did, NASA won't be able to send anybody up to fix it, and it will be a multi-billion-dollar piece of space junk.

And there's a good chance of trouble for the Webb; NASA has been losing its' prime talent to retirement; people recruited before NASA became so ossified and bureaucratic. Which is one reason why they've also been having problems with the Shuttle.

Vitruvius

P.S: I do hope the Webb works out -- it's tailor-made for studying the early universe and for studying planetary nebulae and planet formation; both of which require observation of very faint IR sources.