"This huge device will be parked 1.5 million kilometers from Earth – so no servicing missions will be possible"
Considering that's about four times as far as the moon, I'm not surprised. I get eyelid twitch just thinking about it...
On 24 April, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida carrying a very special cargo: 24,490lbs (11,110kg) of advanced optics, electronics, and antennas that made up the Hubble Space Telescope. The 'scope has revolutionised our understanding of the universe, in part thanks to five …
Just because we don't have a cost effective way for astronauts to service the JW now, doesn't mean there won't be a way a couple decades down the road. Presumably it is being designed for a long service life, and technology will advance during that time. Would have been nice if it could take advantage of a mid life kicker...
A bittersweet day for that package's team: perhaps a decade of work preparing it, then it has to make way for the optics fix and all the glories and good data since. Hope the other teams bought them beers at the next conference...
More than a decade - they started building the High‐Speed Photometer in the 70s. They did manage some success with their science package, though the primary mission was a failure - you can read about it here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/316334 - the module came back to Earth on board Endeavour and was at least useful in exploring the resilience of flight hardware, and if the rest of the telescope de-orbits it will at least be amongst the hardware that survived the mission.
All is not lost, though - the last Hubble service visit installed a soft capture system (the original plan was to bring the whole telescope home in the back of a shuttle) so a future robotic rescue mission is at least theoretically feasible.
"NASA has a plan to send up a de-orbiting module that attaches to Hubble and drives it into orbital decay mode to allow it to be brought down into the ocean or on unpopulated land."
I'm not an aerospace engineer and I think it is great there is a contingency plan in place if the telescope needs to be removed from orbit, but if it can be pushed down, why not go the other direction and keep it going? Even though there are other incredible telescopes coming online, there will be plenty for all of them to do for a very long time.
>why not go the other direction and keep it going
For how long? Just boosting the orbit would need continuing amounts of fuel, eventually that will run out and you have to deorbit anyway.
Operating it means replacement components, generally gyros but batteries, data recorders and computers all die. It also involves a lot of expensive ground support to schedule time, upload missions, collect and store data and pay for people to work on the data.
For how long?
As long as it continues to produce useful scientific data that costs less to obtain than that of replacing it with something else. To be sure keeping something like this requires a budget, most of which is getting the thing into place to begin with, followed on by repairing it when needed. As far as the ground support costs, well that is rather implied in the use of the equipment. In fact, one might argue that having all that data to analyze and store and all of those people involved in doing so is rather the point of the project. As Dr McCarthy was quoted in the article, there may be other options.
...in 25-30 years before Hubble falls/is de-orbited. With the various private companies like SpaceX now in the LEO business after what is really quite a short time, even though building on the shoulders of giants, I can hardly wait to see what will be happening in the launch business in 25 years time. Maybe it will be re-purposed or upgraded or brought back for a museum.
(on the other hand, I'll be about 80 by then so will probably be pissing my self while complaining that everything tastes like chicken.)
Except for thermal IR, where you need to be a couple of million km at L2 or x-ray ground based telescopes are now better.
We are building 30m mirrors, compared to hubble's 2.3m or JWST 6.5m, adaptive optics can beat hubble's resolution and you can build new instruments every year. Building on the ground will always be much cheaper, so you get much more data for your money
The Hubble's mirror was the 11th made. You're really telling me that Lockheed (hmmm, that name rings a bell) built 10 mirrors then screwed up the 11th? Or did the NSA tell Lockheed "just muck it up a little bit, we don't want people to figure out how powerful Keyholes 1 to 10 really are. Those astro-boffin dome-heads won't notice" Occam's razor - sudden error on critical spacecraft component or deliberate mistake? This doesn't take a huge conspiracy either, just a few key people at LH & NSA.
Secondly: "parts of the massive instrument will survive the trip back through Earth's atmosphere and could fall on populated areas" Oh, yeah sure. The Columbia broke up and scattered itself over some very heavily populated areas, and no-one was killed or injured. Plenty of spacecraft have come down over populated areas (there's even a chunk of Soviet spacecraft that landed on Sydney in the Powerhouse Museum) and there is not a single case of anyone being hit. The chances of damage are astronomically (hah!) low. However the chances of someone getting their hands on some of the kit from a Keyhole Spy Satelite? Ah, well, of course THAT is the real problem isn't it?
It is so bloody sad that we have pretty much had single-figure numbers of actually useful space-science telescopes, while there are hundreds of warmongering spy sats of far greater power up there, at hundreds of times the cost, while science has to beg and plead for the tiniest scrap of funding.
Little wonder The Culture aren't interested in Contacting us, we would ruin the party. We really don't deserve to survive as a species. (I might have been reading some Stephen Baxter lately, yes)
I suppose it would cost a lot, but what if NSA fit Hubble for a long flight in to the night?
Nuclear power pack, heaters, long range telemetry, booster and an ion drive.
Send it on a gentle trajectory to towards the most promising exo-planets.
I'm sure a telescope in a far flung position would produce interesting triangulated data with Earth.
It has not gone unnoticed that if you can boost it down, you can boost it up. The question is how much of the telescope is still working when you decide to do it. For example, the NICMOS infrared instrument is not currently working because of a problem with the cooling loop. The other instruments are all working well, so the telescope may have quite a long life span ahead it it, even without repairs.
The cost of continued operation is small -- on the order of a few 10's of millions of dollars a year, so after all the initial investment, you might as well get as much as you can out of it.
If SpaceX finds a way to refurbish Hubble inexpensively some day, that is all the better.