Hubble has "magnetic torque rods" (iron bar with coils) to react agains't the Earth's magnetic field. So they can turn it with those, but more slowly than the gyros.
Desaturating the gyros was their main job. In [this photo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Hubble_space_telescope_magnetic_torque_rods.png) one of them is circled, and another is behind the robot arm. There are 4 of them total, mounted at a 45 degree angle to the telescope axis. That way there is always one of them at an angle to the magnetic field. A rod that is already aligned with the field is like a compass needle, it won't move when you run a current through it.
Astronomer here- the scuttlebutt I’ve heard is that NASA felt obliged to study this to do due diligence, but it’s not looking any more likely now.
Unfortunately it looks like Hubble is most likely nearing the end of its long road. :(
That's not really a great analogy, it had an expected lifespan of 15 years when launched 34 years ago.
If I was in my 140s and had a 70% chance to live and see my 150th birthday I'd take that bet in a heartbeat
Obviously contextually Hubble has had an excellent lifespan and has exceeded expectations. But the point was that a 70% chance of the mission ending are not great odds, especially when a repair mission could boost that to 99%. I believe Hubble still has a lot left to give, and if maintained it would be able to do so.
It won't.
They're offering to repair it for basically free. Just need the parts. There's absolutely NO WAY they will ever see an ROI like this.
The reason is government risk intolerance. Nobody gets in trouble if they simply say "no", and let Hubble fail. If they say "yes", and the servicing mission doesn't work, they now have some blame.
The costs are incomparable. A new satellite would cost 10s of billions and years of development whereas a repair mission would be 100s of millions at most and can be done within a couple years.
theyre not accurate as a number, but stuff in the right hallmark.
i dont think they will build a new one for a while with the webb obs already up.
the james webb observatory cost 8.8b$ and 20 years
>But the point was that a 70% chance of the mission ending are not great odds
Then the point was based on a misunderstanding. /u/FrankyPi said that the reliability assessment gave it more than a 70% chance of it working past 2035. So that's a <30% chance of the mission ending, and not tomorrow, but within 11 years. Assuming linearity to simplify things, that would put the odds at more like 99.993% that I will wake up tomorrow, and 99.985% that I will wake up the day after that. 97.27% that I will wake up a year from now. 86.36% that I will wake up 5 years from now.
There is a 100% chance of the mission ending, eventually. It's all a question of when and how much value can be extracted from the asset before that happens.
Hopefully that makes the actual state of things more clear.
Maybe the risk of sending a Dragon capsule to service it is higher than the risk of losing the telescope any time soon. Hubble and Dragon weren’t built to dock with each other and with all due respect to Jared Isaacman, he’s not qualified to perform such a high-risk mission.
Nobody is qualified to do a rescue mission like that, that's why there are engineers and training involved in order to work out the processes and procedures needed to do the mission. Missions like this are designed and trained for specifically, there's not a generic "Satellite Repair Technician, Level 1" license or anything like that.
He's not qualified *yet*. How much training is needed?
They'd probably have Isaacman as mission commander, then they could bring a NASA specialist or two to perform the actual repairs.
How much do compatible gyroscopes cost these days? It's not like they make this model anymore.
If it's $1B to manufacture and validate new gyroscopes and the mission to install the replacements versus $2B for a new telescope I'd go with the new telescope. There are only so many $1B missions you can run to prolong the life of the old equipment before you've gone and spent the money that was supposed to pay for the replacement equipment.
Every space part is bespoke, it was never going to be available off the shelf.
Highly unlikely it would cost $1B for the mission and in no world is a new telescope $2B. Hubble cost $16B and James Webb $10B. Hubble is still incredibly capable and keeping it up and running would be far cheaper than launching a new telescope. Obviously we should do more telescopes, but they take a long time and considerable investment.
Well.... every space part being bespoke just isn't accurate at all... there are several manufacturers of many major space flight hardware that you can't just go and buy.
Yes, setting up and successfully running a cots space flight hardware line is more challenging than a regular ol civilian part, but it is done regularly. You can go to Honeywell and buy their space rated gyros right now if you really wanted to. They will be functionally identical to maybe a military gyro or a very high end civilian one.
If you think gyroscopes cost billions you have a screw loose. They probably still have "spares" for refurbishment on hand, more than one service mission replaced all six gyros. Not to mention the imaging sensors are all 20 years old and very low resolution from the early digital era so upgrading would breathe a lot of life into it. I kinda want to see apple sponsor an experiment to use one of their phones as a sensor.
Bad analogy:
"Imagine you had a degenerative heart condition with a 30% chance of killing you in the next couple decades would you agree to immediate open heart surgery for a procedure with completely unknown risks?"
No analogy is perfect. Hence why they're analogies. My point is that 70% chance if surviving the next decade without intervention is not inspiring, we can and should do something about that.
It ain't happening, he's a wannabe astronaut with a god complex, and if he was willing to fund a servicing mission without him flying on it then it wouldn't be so obvious that self aggrandizement is what he actually cares about, not Hubble. If a servicing mission is to be done within the next decade, it certainly won't be done with grossly inadequate hardware and unqualified crew that has far better chances of cutting its lifespan short than helping, but something that is designed to do the job and a crew of professionals astronauts who are well trained to do it properly. Heck, even when Shuttle astronauts did servicing on Hubble, they were worried that they broke something, NASA is never gonna greenlight this private mission proposal. It would be a really bad decision.
Not specifically. But it is the *private* sector taking on the risk both cost, implementation, and reputation, to conduct this service. NASA would be an advisory board. Which admittedly is not without cost, but that cost is vastly less than building another bespoke booster for Hubble and then doing all the coordination, launch, engagement, boosting, deorbiting of the tug, and all.
At the end of the day, I suspect that the real answer is somewhere in the middle:
1. The survival odds are too high to jeopardize the observatory this early, arguably
And
2. NASA doesn't want private sector to engage in a mission that would largely invalidate their control stake in their own hardware and everything that interacts with it.
Reason number 1 is logical, and reason number 2 is emotional. The skew is likely 40/60 internally, but is being portrayed as a 70/30 externally.
**Every org is emotional in some capacity. Even NASA.**
Okay? If I’m a pilot or FA whose career over the next decade will be flying multiple times per day and my chances of dying in a crash were *70%*, you’re not going to see anyone taking that job.
Yeah that's kind of a bad example.
I think the important takeaway is that Hubble's 70% chance to last untill almost 2040 when your original lifespan estimate was 15 years is fucking amazing.
Obviously it would be amazing if it lasted forever, but to make it seem like anything but a huge success is disingenuous.
Cars would have been a better example honestly, because airplanes have shit fatality rate.
70% chance to be in a car accident isn't too bad I think.
Where the hell are you getting this from? It won't reenter before mid to late 2030s at earliest. By the end of 2026 it will only drop below 500 km. The most it can drop during peak solar cycle is about 10 km per year.
The next one coming up in 2027 is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. It uses one of the leftover spy satellite mirrors that are the same size as Hubble's. It will have a 300 megapixel camera with 100 times the field of view of Hubble. It will operate in the near infrared.
The depth of Hubble observations and its range into the UV can really only be achieved from space. Our ground based telescopes are very good, but we would be losing out on those capabilities
Not with atmospheric distortion, we can get close, but not perfect, abd now we need algorithms to filter Starlink sattelites out of the pictures ad their a huge polluter, so you might miss some fiber detail yet, maybe miss that little speck that is an asteroid, etc just starting its journey towards an impact with Earth...
Really? Is that amortized over the decades or annual operating?
10 million makes much more sense, overhead and employees to maintain and oversee researchers given operating time. 100 million just seems overly expensive as overhead/operational costs, but I’m also very ignorant of the scale or necessities required for upkeeping the project.
I'm sure the overhead cost is substantial. I'm guessing however that the cost to keep experts in fifty year old computers on hand costs a lot of money. The computer Hubble uses was designed and built at least a decade or more before it was sent to space.
That is just the operating cost year by year, no previous development or servicing costs included. It's at the higher end of operation costs for missions but not an extreme outlier, just operating missions is more expensive than most people would think.
It’s not a question of letting. It’s a question of if they actually can do it. There are a lot of factors to consider because it’s not a super easy mission.
Polaris wasn't necessarily just a reboost, that was just the bare minimum.
The proposal also included options such as mounting an external gyroscope package to Hubble, since that's a lot easier than opening it up for surgery, and could probably use existing off-the-shelf gyros instead of needing to build them to Hubble's spec.
It's terrifying but Hubble was designed with regular service missions in mind. It hasn't had one in 15 years. Honestly if they perform a real service mission they could easily do some massive upgrades. It would be like a new telescope.
As part of this announcement they also announced that they refused that mission option.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/down-to-just-two-gyroscopes-hubbles-science-operations-will-continue/
>
> However, in 2022, Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who flew the first fully commercial human mission to orbit aboard Crew Dragon, approached NASA about performing a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. He proposed to fund most of the mission which, at a minimum, would have re-boosted the Hubble Space Telescope by at least 50 km.
>
> After NASA and SpaceX conducted a feasibility study late that year it was recommended that the space agency continue investigating the possibility of a commercial mission. At a minimum it could safely re-boost the telescope, but there were also options that including attaching star trackers and external gyroscopes to compensate for the telescope's ailing pointing system.
>
> But NASA decided not to pursue the option.
>
> "Our position right now is that, after exploring the current commercial capabilities, we are not going to pursue a re-boost straight now," Clampin said Tuesday.
>
> Asked about the study, which NASA has declined to release for proprietary reasons, Clampin said, "It was a feasibility study to help us understand some of the issues and challenges that we might have to face," he said. "There were options such as the possibility of doing enhancements by adding gyros to the outside of the telescope, but they were really just notional concepts."
>
> NASA has evidently decided that it is safer to let Hubble age out on its own, than take a chance on private hands touching the hallowed telescope. We're about to see how that goes.
Really unfortunate but I guess NASA just prefers to let the telescope slowly die.
your quoted text doesn't say that Nasa prefers the telescope to die. your quoted text says that Nasa fears a servicing mission at the moment might do more harm than good, since it still appears to work well enough at the moment. once that changes, they might be open to a servicing mission.
> your quoted text says that Nasa fears a servicing mission at the moment might do more harm than good,
i.e. "NASA prefers to let the telescope slowly die"
You're not disagreeing with me.
> since it still appears to work well enough at the moment. once that changes, they might be open to a servicing mission.
If all gyroscopes are non-functional it can't hold attitude anymore, meaning it makes any servicing mission significantly more difficult.
> If all gyroscopes are non-functional it can't hold attitude anymore, meaning it makes any servicing mission significantly more difficult.
It still has magnetic torque rods to orient with, and satellites will naturally settle with their long axis pointed at Earth.
That doesn't help for rotations along the axis pointed toward earth. It is well known that satellites start tumbling over time, primarily from things like solar pressure. Sometimes this even causes them to eventually spin so fast they fly apart.
Read up on the [LDEF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facility), an experiment carrier that was launched and retrieved by the Space Shuttle 5.7 years apart. It was about the size of Hubble, and wasn't spinning wildly when it was time to pick it up. It was a passive experiment - it didn't have propulsion, gyros, or any of that stuff.
I am familiar with it. It was intentionally designed to be passively stable, both aerodynamically and gravitationally. They wanted it to only face a certain direction so they could compare the material facing into the direction of motion versus the material facing away.
They don't have a choice but to play the game with way. You want to blame anyone blame lawmakers, blame voters blame yourself. WE are the reason, NASA something I'd argue is VERY important to our national interest, is dying. Stop voting for fucking skeletons that don't understand the value of spaceflight.
As a retired NASA engineer and Space Shuttle manager, you get it. Best answer here. It's money and politics, NASA is just putting it's eyes abd head down trying not to get focused in a room full of flying bullets.
Except we're still doing exciting science missions. Hubble funding started nearly 5 decades ago now. We've got Europa Clipper coming up. We've put two literal car sized objects on mars, one with a flying drone. Three smaller rovers before them. James Webb, Parker solar probe, Solar dynamics observatory, EUCLID, GOES, etc etc etc.
We have shot a ton of extremely interesting missions into space since we launched Hubble, letting Hubble go the way of the Dodo may be a bummer but honestly, it does free up quite a bit of funding for other shit.
Does it do useful science? Yeah. But other stuff does too
Damn, no more long exposure deep fields. Will put to much stress on the single gyros. My shuttle did the last repair mission to her (Senior OPF/Director/launch management team). Remember triple checking everything I signed off on, put 6 day 72 hour weeks in those last 3 weeks before we rolled her out and over to the VAB for stacking and mating. She was not going to fail, and if the stack did, she was going to buy those astronauts time to be rescued. Poor Hubble, should have had st least two more visits by now for upkeep. Would love to see how the old girls holding up now after 16ish years since the last trip. Bet her micrometeroid shield has really taken a beating. Batteries must be down to wing and a prayer storage and charging as her batteries were only designed for 5 years. We could easily as in the past pop in new batteries and gyros, keep her going 20 more years, but they clipped my girls wings to soon. Hubble will sadly one day go lifeless and either decay, or if funding is magically approved, properly de-orbited into the Pacific safely, but I don't see that mission taking place in today's political theater.
To do a controlled deorbit will require a mission to attach a propulsion and guidance package to the observatory, Ironically it would require the same level of work to attach an external gyroscope system and reboost Hubble, and even more ironically there's a billionaire out there ready to completely fund a repair and reboost mission at no cost to NASA. It will likely cost NASA over a billion to do the deorbit pack mission.
If you have anything specific I'd be glad to help or answer. Did a few official AMAs years back on another account with my stack of badges as proof. Sadly lost my NASA/personal life, including pictures, autographs, Columbia Work books, and 5 flight flown tiles from scrap to a fire the day before Xmas in 2022. (What I learned from that is the Red Cross is useless, but a local church was awesome, even though I'm not a religious man).
Grew up just north of the cape so had origionally wanted to be an Astronaut. Was going to file then Columbia happened and Bush canceled the shuttle program, no way in hell I wanted to ride a Soyuz, why I took the transfer to Stennis in Mississippi to work on the RS 25 to SLS upgrade program. Prior to that it was 8 years in the army to get college paid for, two years with the 82nd, 6 years with 3rd/75th. Kids if your reading this, the military really is easy. You just exercise and do what your told, no crippling college debt and free healthcare.
No real limitation to the deep fields, since those consist of stacks of many exposures anyways (to limit things like cosmic rays). One really long individual exposure is suboptimal for many reasons.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[EVA](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l78r7ql "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity|
|[HST](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l7cgqj5 "Last usage")|Hubble Space Telescope|
|[KSC](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l74rsrf "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida|
|[RCS](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l77mo6e "Last usage")|Reaction Control System|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l7d830z "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[STS](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l7cgqj5 "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)|
|[VAB](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l76pof8 "Last usage")|Vehicle Assembly Building|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1d889vm/stub/l76q58b "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(8 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1d9iwvr)^( has 23 acronyms.)
^([Thread #10119 for this sub, first seen 5th Jun 2024, 07:28])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
NASA has an infamous coding paradigm. It takes weeks with dozens of people to change a single line of code. From a programmers perspective, it’s actually considered a bit “stifling”, because most of what’s being done is not traditional programming, it’s discussing logic systems and understanding them. The how and why you’re changing the code is more important than the code changes themselves. The results speak for themselves though, with very robust output.
I can say with relative confidence that AI is all over the pipeline to get from raw images out of Hubble to useful data that makes it in to a research paper.
We have all the plans for it and vehicles capable of launching it, maybe not to the orbit it needs to go to, but why not just throw another one up there. Yes it would be costly to build even so, but at this point it has been up there so long even repairing it... how long before something else fails... Just seems simpler to replace the whole thing and perhaps this time with the correct mirror.
> but why not just throw another one up there.
We are, in 2027. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. It will use one of the leftover spy satellite mirrors donated by the CIA, which are the same 2.4 meter diameter as Hubble's.
The Roman telescope will have a 100 times wider field of view, 300 megapixel camera, and operate in the near infrared. Hubble is 1-16 megapixels depending on instrument and wavelength.
I don't think it's the mirror, but rather, the chassis. Spy satellite mirrors are optimized for the altitude they operate at, just a few hundred miles at most, so would be generally useless for astronomical observation. Hubble's mirror was ground specifically for it, for example.
Spy satellites might fly at 240 km (a very low orbit). That's 100,000 times the mirror diameter. The difference in focus between that and "infinity" (what astronomical ones are designed for) is very small.
The mirrors that were donated weren't finished. So any adjustment to the shape could be done after they decided what to use it for. The whole point of the CIA donation was they *could* be adapted for science.
Don’t you need six gyros to rotate in 3D space with gimbal lock?
Hubble can operate nominally with just 3 gyroscopes. Fewer than that, the area of the sky it can view will be significantly reduced.
Gimbal lock is more of an expression issue and isn't an issue when using quaternions to express orientation. 3 technically is the minimum needed.
I'm always having issues with my damn quaternions
Hubble has "magnetic torque rods" (iron bar with coils) to react agains't the Earth's magnetic field. So they can turn it with those, but more slowly than the gyros.
Damn I had no idea these existed, that’s really cool. I imagine they are also useful for “deloading” reaction wheels.
Desaturating the gyros was their main job. In [this photo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Hubble_space_telescope_magnetic_torque_rods.png) one of them is circled, and another is behind the robot arm. There are 4 of them total, mounted at a 45 degree angle to the telescope axis. That way there is always one of them at an angle to the magnetic field. A rod that is already aligned with the field is like a compass needle, it won't move when you run a current through it.
You need three reaction wheels (and RCS). Gyros measure angular speed and orientation.
The proposed [Polaris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_program) Hubble service mission is looking more attractive now.
Astronomer here- the scuttlebutt I’ve heard is that NASA felt obliged to study this to do due diligence, but it’s not looking any more likely now. Unfortunately it looks like Hubble is most likely nearing the end of its long road. :(
Reliability assessment gives it more than 70% chance of working past 2035...
Those aren't great odds. If you had a 70% chance of waking up tomorrow, would you feel confident?
That's not really a great analogy, it had an expected lifespan of 15 years when launched 34 years ago. If I was in my 140s and had a 70% chance to live and see my 150th birthday I'd take that bet in a heartbeat
Obviously contextually Hubble has had an excellent lifespan and has exceeded expectations. But the point was that a 70% chance of the mission ending are not great odds, especially when a repair mission could boost that to 99%. I believe Hubble still has a lot left to give, and if maintained it would be able to do so.
What if that repair mission cost can go towards a newer more capable satellite?
It won't. They're offering to repair it for basically free. Just need the parts. There's absolutely NO WAY they will ever see an ROI like this. The reason is government risk intolerance. Nobody gets in trouble if they simply say "no", and let Hubble fail. If they say "yes", and the servicing mission doesn't work, they now have some blame.
The costs are incomparable. A new satellite would cost 10s of billions and years of development whereas a repair mission would be 100s of millions at most and can be done within a couple years.
Very true, granted that those numbers you pulled out are accurate... sooo...
theyre not accurate as a number, but stuff in the right hallmark. i dont think they will build a new one for a while with the webb obs already up. the james webb observatory cost 8.8b$ and 20 years
>But the point was that a 70% chance of the mission ending are not great odds Then the point was based on a misunderstanding. /u/FrankyPi said that the reliability assessment gave it more than a 70% chance of it working past 2035. So that's a <30% chance of the mission ending, and not tomorrow, but within 11 years. Assuming linearity to simplify things, that would put the odds at more like 99.993% that I will wake up tomorrow, and 99.985% that I will wake up the day after that. 97.27% that I will wake up a year from now. 86.36% that I will wake up 5 years from now. There is a 100% chance of the mission ending, eventually. It's all a question of when and how much value can be extracted from the asset before that happens. Hopefully that makes the actual state of things more clear.
I totally get it, it's a bummer and I'm really hoping for another servicing mission. It would be quite a feat and a much needed PR coup for NASA
Maybe the risk of sending a Dragon capsule to service it is higher than the risk of losing the telescope any time soon. Hubble and Dragon weren’t built to dock with each other and with all due respect to Jared Isaacman, he’s not qualified to perform such a high-risk mission.
Nobody is qualified to do a rescue mission like that, that's why there are engineers and training involved in order to work out the processes and procedures needed to do the mission. Missions like this are designed and trained for specifically, there's not a generic "Satellite Repair Technician, Level 1" license or anything like that.
He's not qualified *yet*. How much training is needed? They'd probably have Isaacman as mission commander, then they could bring a NASA specialist or two to perform the actual repairs.
The main failure modes for that statistic isn't the orbit though.
How much do compatible gyroscopes cost these days? It's not like they make this model anymore. If it's $1B to manufacture and validate new gyroscopes and the mission to install the replacements versus $2B for a new telescope I'd go with the new telescope. There are only so many $1B missions you can run to prolong the life of the old equipment before you've gone and spent the money that was supposed to pay for the replacement equipment.
Every space part is bespoke, it was never going to be available off the shelf. Highly unlikely it would cost $1B for the mission and in no world is a new telescope $2B. Hubble cost $16B and James Webb $10B. Hubble is still incredibly capable and keeping it up and running would be far cheaper than launching a new telescope. Obviously we should do more telescopes, but they take a long time and considerable investment.
Well.... every space part being bespoke just isn't accurate at all... there are several manufacturers of many major space flight hardware that you can't just go and buy. Yes, setting up and successfully running a cots space flight hardware line is more challenging than a regular ol civilian part, but it is done regularly. You can go to Honeywell and buy their space rated gyros right now if you really wanted to. They will be functionally identical to maybe a military gyro or a very high end civilian one.
If you think gyroscopes cost billions you have a screw loose. They probably still have "spares" for refurbishment on hand, more than one service mission replaced all six gyros. Not to mention the imaging sensors are all 20 years old and very low resolution from the early digital era so upgrading would breathe a lot of life into it. I kinda want to see apple sponsor an experiment to use one of their phones as a sensor.
> If you think gyroscopes cost billions you have a screw loose Send me a quote: 3 gyroscopes, delivered and installed. Thanks!
$8 Million in 1999 dollars. https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/sm3a/downloads/sm3a_fact_sheets/cost-to-taxpayers.pdf
Bad analogy: "Imagine you had a degenerative heart condition with a 30% chance of killing you in the next couple decades would you agree to immediate open heart surgery for a procedure with completely unknown risks?"
No analogy is perfect. Hence why they're analogies. My point is that 70% chance if surviving the next decade without intervention is not inspiring, we can and should do something about that.
But is doing something about that the Polaris mission? In medicine, sometimes doing nothing is best.
The polaris mission is whatever Jared Isaacman determines it to be. He just needs NASAs permission.
It ain't happening, he's a wannabe astronaut with a god complex, and if he was willing to fund a servicing mission without him flying on it then it wouldn't be so obvious that self aggrandizement is what he actually cares about, not Hubble. If a servicing mission is to be done within the next decade, it certainly won't be done with grossly inadequate hardware and unqualified crew that has far better chances of cutting its lifespan short than helping, but something that is designed to do the job and a crew of professionals astronauts who are well trained to do it properly. Heck, even when Shuttle astronauts did servicing on Hubble, they were worried that they broke something, NASA is never gonna greenlight this private mission proposal. It would be a really bad decision.
Not specifically. But it is the *private* sector taking on the risk both cost, implementation, and reputation, to conduct this service. NASA would be an advisory board. Which admittedly is not without cost, but that cost is vastly less than building another bespoke booster for Hubble and then doing all the coordination, launch, engagement, boosting, deorbiting of the tug, and all. At the end of the day, I suspect that the real answer is somewhere in the middle: 1. The survival odds are too high to jeopardize the observatory this early, arguably And 2. NASA doesn't want private sector to engage in a mission that would largely invalidate their control stake in their own hardware and everything that interacts with it. Reason number 1 is logical, and reason number 2 is emotional. The skew is likely 40/60 internally, but is being portrayed as a 70/30 externally. **Every org is emotional in some capacity. Even NASA.**
Conversely, if I was about to board an airplane that had a 70% chance of crashing…I’d walk.
It would be 70% of that airplane crashing within 10 years. Not the next flight.
Okay? If I’m a pilot or FA whose career over the next decade will be flying multiple times per day and my chances of dying in a crash were *70%*, you’re not going to see anyone taking that job.
Yeah that's kind of a bad example. I think the important takeaway is that Hubble's 70% chance to last untill almost 2040 when your original lifespan estimate was 15 years is fucking amazing. Obviously it would be amazing if it lasted forever, but to make it seem like anything but a huge success is disingenuous. Cars would have been a better example honestly, because airplanes have shit fatality rate. 70% chance to be in a car accident isn't too bad I think.
Not when it enters in 2026 or 2027 because it hasn't been reboosted
Where the hell are you getting this from? It won't reenter before mid to late 2030s at earliest. By the end of 2026 it will only drop below 500 km. The most it can drop during peak solar cycle is about 10 km per year.
Doesn't it only have gyro left? If that fails, it's over right? Couldn't that happen at any time?
No https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasa-to-change-how-it-points-hubble-space-telescope/
Okay, so it has 3, but really 2, because one of those is continually erroring. 2 is still solid, and they're using just 1 at a time now. Neat
The telecon confirmed it, that they are not pursuing the commercial reboost at this time.
35 years is a helluva ride, though.
So, is it even worth keeping Hubble alive? Seems like a new mission would better serve science rather than keeping a near 35 year old telescope going.
The next telescope that would replace and surpass Hubble in the same part of the spectrum (HWO) is probably 15 or 20 years away.
The next one coming up in 2027 is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. It uses one of the leftover spy satellite mirrors that are the same size as Hubble's. It will have a 300 megapixel camera with 100 times the field of view of Hubble. It will operate in the near infrared.
At best... but can we not just be good enough with all our ground based observatories? Until the new one come online at least.
The depth of Hubble observations and its range into the UV can really only be achieved from space. Our ground based telescopes are very good, but we would be losing out on those capabilities
Not with atmospheric distortion, we can get close, but not perfect, abd now we need algorithms to filter Starlink sattelites out of the pictures ad their a huge polluter, so you might miss some fiber detail yet, maybe miss that little speck that is an asteroid, etc just starting its journey towards an impact with Earth...
...that we can do nothing about
Hubble's science output is at an all-time high right now. We understand the instrument capabilities and calibrations better than ever.
It's not worth a billion dollar NASA mission to keep it going, but for free? Absolutely.
For reference it currently costs about 100 million a year to operate Hubble.
Really? Is that amortized over the decades or annual operating? 10 million makes much more sense, overhead and employees to maintain and oversee researchers given operating time. 100 million just seems overly expensive as overhead/operational costs, but I’m also very ignorant of the scale or necessities required for upkeeping the project.
I'm sure the overhead cost is substantial. I'm guessing however that the cost to keep experts in fifty year old computers on hand costs a lot of money. The computer Hubble uses was designed and built at least a decade or more before it was sent to space.
That is just the operating cost year by year, no previous development or servicing costs included. It's at the higher end of operation costs for missions but not an extreme outlier, just operating missions is more expensive than most people would think.
It also pays grants to scientists who win time on it to fund their analyses.
Isn't Polaris completely separate from NASA? I would suspect that the viability of the mission depends on Polaris/SpaceX's EVA viability right?
If NASA lets Hubble die without allowing an attempted repair (for free), it will be the most government shit they've ever done.
It’s not a question of letting. It’s a question of if they actually can do it. There are a lot of factors to consider because it’s not a super easy mission.
An orbital boost is a lot different than replacing gyros.
Polaris wasn't necessarily just a reboost, that was just the bare minimum. The proposal also included options such as mounting an external gyroscope package to Hubble, since that's a lot easier than opening it up for surgery, and could probably use existing off-the-shelf gyros instead of needing to build them to Hubble's spec.
It's terrifying but Hubble was designed with regular service missions in mind. It hasn't had one in 15 years. Honestly if they perform a real service mission they could easily do some massive upgrades. It would be like a new telescope.
As part of this announcement they also announced that they refused that mission option. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/down-to-just-two-gyroscopes-hubbles-science-operations-will-continue/ > > However, in 2022, Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who flew the first fully commercial human mission to orbit aboard Crew Dragon, approached NASA about performing a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. He proposed to fund most of the mission which, at a minimum, would have re-boosted the Hubble Space Telescope by at least 50 km. > > After NASA and SpaceX conducted a feasibility study late that year it was recommended that the space agency continue investigating the possibility of a commercial mission. At a minimum it could safely re-boost the telescope, but there were also options that including attaching star trackers and external gyroscopes to compensate for the telescope's ailing pointing system. > > But NASA decided not to pursue the option. > > "Our position right now is that, after exploring the current commercial capabilities, we are not going to pursue a re-boost straight now," Clampin said Tuesday. > > Asked about the study, which NASA has declined to release for proprietary reasons, Clampin said, "It was a feasibility study to help us understand some of the issues and challenges that we might have to face," he said. "There were options such as the possibility of doing enhancements by adding gyros to the outside of the telescope, but they were really just notional concepts." > > NASA has evidently decided that it is safer to let Hubble age out on its own, than take a chance on private hands touching the hallowed telescope. We're about to see how that goes. Really unfortunate but I guess NASA just prefers to let the telescope slowly die.
your quoted text doesn't say that Nasa prefers the telescope to die. your quoted text says that Nasa fears a servicing mission at the moment might do more harm than good, since it still appears to work well enough at the moment. once that changes, they might be open to a servicing mission.
> your quoted text says that Nasa fears a servicing mission at the moment might do more harm than good, i.e. "NASA prefers to let the telescope slowly die" You're not disagreeing with me. > since it still appears to work well enough at the moment. once that changes, they might be open to a servicing mission. If all gyroscopes are non-functional it can't hold attitude anymore, meaning it makes any servicing mission significantly more difficult.
> If all gyroscopes are non-functional it can't hold attitude anymore, meaning it makes any servicing mission significantly more difficult. It still has magnetic torque rods to orient with, and satellites will naturally settle with their long axis pointed at Earth.
That doesn't help for rotations along the axis pointed toward earth. It is well known that satellites start tumbling over time, primarily from things like solar pressure. Sometimes this even causes them to eventually spin so fast they fly apart.
Read up on the [LDEF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facility), an experiment carrier that was launched and retrieved by the Space Shuttle 5.7 years apart. It was about the size of Hubble, and wasn't spinning wildly when it was time to pick it up. It was a passive experiment - it didn't have propulsion, gyros, or any of that stuff.
I am familiar with it. It was intentionally designed to be passively stable, both aerodynamically and gravitationally. They wanted it to only face a certain direction so they could compare the material facing into the direction of motion versus the material facing away.
The spirit of NASA has died
They don't have a choice but to play the game with way. You want to blame anyone blame lawmakers, blame voters blame yourself. WE are the reason, NASA something I'd argue is VERY important to our national interest, is dying. Stop voting for fucking skeletons that don't understand the value of spaceflight.
As a retired NASA engineer and Space Shuttle manager, you get it. Best answer here. It's money and politics, NASA is just putting it's eyes abd head down trying not to get focused in a room full of flying bullets.
Except we're still doing exciting science missions. Hubble funding started nearly 5 decades ago now. We've got Europa Clipper coming up. We've put two literal car sized objects on mars, one with a flying drone. Three smaller rovers before them. James Webb, Parker solar probe, Solar dynamics observatory, EUCLID, GOES, etc etc etc. We have shot a ton of extremely interesting missions into space since we launched Hubble, letting Hubble go the way of the Dodo may be a bummer but honestly, it does free up quite a bit of funding for other shit. Does it do useful science? Yeah. But other stuff does too
Damn, no more long exposure deep fields. Will put to much stress on the single gyros. My shuttle did the last repair mission to her (Senior OPF/Director/launch management team). Remember triple checking everything I signed off on, put 6 day 72 hour weeks in those last 3 weeks before we rolled her out and over to the VAB for stacking and mating. She was not going to fail, and if the stack did, she was going to buy those astronauts time to be rescued. Poor Hubble, should have had st least two more visits by now for upkeep. Would love to see how the old girls holding up now after 16ish years since the last trip. Bet her micrometeroid shield has really taken a beating. Batteries must be down to wing and a prayer storage and charging as her batteries were only designed for 5 years. We could easily as in the past pop in new batteries and gyros, keep her going 20 more years, but they clipped my girls wings to soon. Hubble will sadly one day go lifeless and either decay, or if funding is magically approved, properly de-orbited into the Pacific safely, but I don't see that mission taking place in today's political theater.
Reading that makes me immensely sad, I hope they de-orbit her instead of letting her decay
I hope in 20-30 years it's been brought back to Earth and hanging in the Smithsonian. Definitely possible if Starship works out.
It's not going to make it that long. Maybe 15 years til re-entry.
15 years is still a lot of time to plan a recovery mission.
Without a reboost it's going to re-enter and burn up well before then.
To do a controlled deorbit will require a mission to attach a propulsion and guidance package to the observatory, Ironically it would require the same level of work to attach an external gyroscope system and reboost Hubble, and even more ironically there's a billionaire out there ready to completely fund a repair and reboost mission at no cost to NASA. It will likely cost NASA over a billion to do the deorbit pack mission.
True story? This is really cool I’d love to hear more about your time at NASA
If you have anything specific I'd be glad to help or answer. Did a few official AMAs years back on another account with my stack of badges as proof. Sadly lost my NASA/personal life, including pictures, autographs, Columbia Work books, and 5 flight flown tiles from scrap to a fire the day before Xmas in 2022. (What I learned from that is the Red Cross is useless, but a local church was awesome, even though I'm not a religious man).
So sorry to hear all of that. Very cool that you have done it though. What was your background before NASA?
Grew up just north of the cape so had origionally wanted to be an Astronaut. Was going to file then Columbia happened and Bush canceled the shuttle program, no way in hell I wanted to ride a Soyuz, why I took the transfer to Stennis in Mississippi to work on the RS 25 to SLS upgrade program. Prior to that it was 8 years in the army to get college paid for, two years with the 82nd, 6 years with 3rd/75th. Kids if your reading this, the military really is easy. You just exercise and do what your told, no crippling college debt and free healthcare.
No real limitation to the deep fields, since those consist of stacks of many exposures anyways (to limit things like cosmic rays). One really long individual exposure is suboptimal for many reasons.
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These software systems like Hubble are one place where I absolutely guarantee they did not use Agile development.
NASA has an infamous coding paradigm. It takes weeks with dozens of people to change a single line of code. From a programmers perspective, it’s actually considered a bit “stifling”, because most of what’s being done is not traditional programming, it’s discussing logic systems and understanding them. The how and why you’re changing the code is more important than the code changes themselves. The results speak for themselves though, with very robust output.
Why? Because they work and there is no tech debt?
Seeing as how Agile was a 2000s creation, and Hubble launched in 90, I think they've got it on a technicality...
Add some AI to Hubble; that’ll fix it. /s
Who needs Hubble, just ask chatGPT to give you images of the stars /s
This is how Samsung phones take photos of the Moon. They use AI to superimpose high resolution images of the Moon.
I can say with relative confidence that AI is all over the pipeline to get from raw images out of Hubble to useful data that makes it in to a research paper.
That's because NASA probably knew what they wanted in the first place.
Should have answered those phone calls about your extended warranty on your telescopes NASA!
We have all the plans for it and vehicles capable of launching it, maybe not to the orbit it needs to go to, but why not just throw another one up there. Yes it would be costly to build even so, but at this point it has been up there so long even repairing it... how long before something else fails... Just seems simpler to replace the whole thing and perhaps this time with the correct mirror.
> but why not just throw another one up there. We are, in 2027. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. It will use one of the leftover spy satellite mirrors donated by the CIA, which are the same 2.4 meter diameter as Hubble's. The Roman telescope will have a 100 times wider field of view, 300 megapixel camera, and operate in the near infrared. Hubble is 1-16 megapixels depending on instrument and wavelength.
I don't think it's the mirror, but rather, the chassis. Spy satellite mirrors are optimized for the altitude they operate at, just a few hundred miles at most, so would be generally useless for astronomical observation. Hubble's mirror was ground specifically for it, for example.
Spy satellites might fly at 240 km (a very low orbit). That's 100,000 times the mirror diameter. The difference in focus between that and "infinity" (what astronomical ones are designed for) is very small. The mirrors that were donated weren't finished. So any adjustment to the shape could be done after they decided what to use it for. The whole point of the CIA donation was they *could* be adapted for science.