Discussion Replacement of HST

[Wishbone]

What about those in the graveyard orbit? Any chance of hope for them?

 

[garyw]

What sort of hope? Graveyard is above GEO.

 

[orbitingpluto]

What about those in the graveyard orbit? Any chance of hope for them?

:huh:

My faith has been shaken.

 

[Wishbone]

Of meeting the or re-incarnating (when their isotopes and reactors have gone cold XD )

 

[Unstung]

Meh, I thought this thread was going to be a discussion about the Webb telescope (which will also die a fiery death), and not why Hubble should be left up there.
As far as I know, the Webb telescope is an improvement over Hubble.

 

[orbitingpluto]

Maybe something doesn't need to go out the fiery way to meet the .

I could meet the .

!

 

[Grover]

yea, the Webb is by far a better telescope, and im sure the scientists at NASA and other places privileged enough to use it will learn a lot, but the HST has a life behind it, its seen some awesome stuff

for instance, my favourite one was when it watched an asteroid similar to the one they think killed the dinosaurs get caught in jupiter's gravitational field, when it would otherwise have hit earth (all hail Jupiter, saviour of earth), those were some great pictures.

 

[garyw]

for instance, my favourite one was when it watched an asteroid similar to the one they think killed the dinosaurs get caught in jupiter's gravitational field, when it would otherwise have hit earth (all hail Jupiter, saviour of earth), those were some great pictures.

Do you mean a comet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9

If that's the event you mean it wasn't just hubble that was looking at the event.

 

[N_Molson]

It has to burn, it's a matter of safety for future space travels. The less orbiting debris / derelict spaceships we have, the best it is !

 

[tblaxland]

As far as I know, the Webb telescope is an improvement over Hubble.

Webb is a different telescope. At the very least, Webb is optimised for IR wavelengths, Hubble for visible wavelengths. Are apples better than oranges?

There are better visible wavelength telescopes than Hubble, but they are already on the ground and they will be staying there (eg, Keck, LBT, VLT).

 

[Urwumpe]

Also, the E-ELT is now funded, and will get build, making a much better visible light telescope more on Earth.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope"]European Extremely Large Telescope - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

[Eccentrus]

and the ESO is already one very powerful ray of telescopes, the most powerful one, IIRC, because visible light is somewhat easier to observe on earth rather than some other spectrum of the EM wave, ergo the need to build the space telescopes is to observe some spectrum that is hard to detect / undetectable on the lower atmosphere, especially for the high-energy spectrum ones, like X-Ray or Gamma which rarely penetrates to the lower atmosphere, where we can build our humongous monstrosity of scientific tools. But, for the Radio waves, we just need very-very large space to built them, then again, there's IR, which because of the composition of the atmosphere, are a tad bit hard to do in the lower atmosphere as well (remember water vapor?) hence the JWST. but then again, the moon, or other planetary bodies can very well make excellent spots for telescopes as well, like in the Voyage to the planets series (the one with that pegasus spaceship), they also brought a near-IR telescope to Pluto, and use the extremely low temperature there to increase the sensitivity of the telescope.

oh well, could I be rambling too much about this?

What I want to actually say is, JWST is not the improvement of hubble, myriads of the giant telescopes on ground are (well, since we managed to invent the technique to use different telescopes to observe particular wavelengths of visible lights, ground telescopes can produce clearer, and sharper pictures than HST, and it was since used more as a "scout" to look for targets for which gigantic ground telescopes to focus at later)

 

[River Crab]

Even I (I'm practically a witch, if you didn't know) think it should be deorbited.
As a machine, it's done it's job and more. And call it animism, but I think it would be best to deorbit Hubble to rest, where it would finally be able to benefit from it's meaningful existence. It's like an old flag- it may symbolize much, but in the end, as it reaches the end of its useful life, the best thing to do is to burn it with respect.

Also, JWST is awesome. I wish the best of luck for a legacy as great as Hubble. :thumbup:

 

[Unstung]

Ah, found this thread.
SPACE.com: NASA's Next Big Space Telescope to Cost an Extra $1.5 Billion
JWST has been delayed for 15 months... so far.

 

[OrbiterSpore]

In my opinion they should bring the telescope back to earth SAFELY and make something like and tour for public presentations(i always wanted to see it!) around the U.S.(The world maybe...) it would be a good idea if that anti-historical ppl can't figure that HST isn't an toy to be trashed...