NASA to fix Hubble!

NASA announced today that they will be sending up a mission to repair the ailing Hubble Space Telescope.

Cool!

Hubble was launched in 1990, and was designed to be periodically upgraded as technology improved (it was originally launched with a processor that was designed in the 1970s-- even when a new chip was placed on board in 1993 it was basically a 386!). There have been four previous mission to put in new cameras, replace the solar panels, and so on.

This new mission, scheduled for launch in spring of 2008, will put in two new cameras, install a new telescope to help Hubble lock onto astronomical targets, replace the failing gyroscopes and batteries, and put in some miscellaneous hardware. They also plan on trying to repair a camera called STIS which shorted out in 2004. That last one will be tricky-- it involves pulling 111 screws of the camera and replacing an electronics board. That's not so easy while wearing big bulky astronaut gloves.

All these new capabilities will extend Hubble's vision, allowing it to see fainter objects, more distant objects, and objects that emit light outside what we can normally see. It will certainly give us clues about wonderful science topics like planets orbiting other stars, what the mysterious dark matter and dark energy are made of (these two things make up the vast majority of the universe, yet truthfully we know very little about them), how galaxies came to be, how stars are born, and how they die (what astronomers call stellar (gasp!) evolution).

The cost of the mission, including launch, is $900 million. That may sound like a lot, but in fact it's not so bad (even if you don't compare it to, say, a week's worth of Iraq war). That amount will pay for the vast amount of work needed to prepare the astronauts and engineers to train for the mission, to get the Shuttle ready, and of course to pay for the launch itself.

Is it worth it? I sure think so. It sounds like a lot when you state it in one big lump, but really 900 million isn't that much in the life of a government expenditure... especially when you pro-rate it over the next 18 months, and over the (now) 300 million people in the US. That's only 2 bucks per person per year!

Wanna recoup your investment? Go to Google images, search on some tasty science words like "Hubble nebula", download any of the dozens of spectacular images you find, and tape it to your wall. There. You've been paid back.

I give public lectures about astronomy, and one of my favorite things to do is give away prints of Hubble images (I get them from the Hubble folks who -- using your tax dollars -- print them for educational purposes). Kids always rush the stage to grab those prints. Always. And when I see the expressions on their faces when they look at the pictures... yeah. The money's worth it.