Hubble Space Telescope
From Slackerpedia Galactica
The Space Telescope will be the eighth wonder of the world.
- -- James Beggs, NASA Administrator under Ronald Reagan</dd>
It ought to be at that price.
- -- Rep. Edward Boland, US House of Representatives, 1984</dd>
The Hubble Space Telescope is a really big telescope that takes really cool pictures of various astronomical things.
It is named after Edwin Hubble, the famous Astronomer who helped dispel the galactic-centricity myth, essentially marking an end to the "We're at the center of something." series of myths. It is also in space. (The telescope, not his ego.)
Lyman Spitzer was one of the earliest astronomers to talk seriously about putting a telescope in space. Given that he started in 1946, eleven years before Sputnik, he was putting the cart a wee bit before the horse. But he got a different space telescope named after him, so it's all good.
But in all seriousness, it has provided a remarkable view of our universe from a few hundred miles up. one image that best sums up the power and importance of HST was the Hubble Deep Field, a pinhead-sized "empty spot" on the sky that HST stared at for ten days in late 1995, with absolutely no expectations. (In fact, the original observing proposal was met with tepid interest and was just barely approved thanks to Director Discretionary Time.) The resulting observation reaches a depth of 30th magnitude, unheard of from ground-based telescopes, and revealed tens of thousands of galaxies. When shown to a public audience for the first time, their looks of shock and awe (and occasionally, horror) are priceless.
It will eventually be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope, but the recently announced repair mission to HST has probably pushed its launch back by a few years at least.
Originally, HST was going to be regularly launched and returned via the Space Shuttle. Every few years the shuttle would pick up HST and bring it home to be repaired and upgraded. Then it would return it to orbit. However, after the Challenger disaster, the flight rules of the shuttle were changed. The new rules doesn't allow the shuttle to return with a payload as heavy as HST. The reason is that the shuttle's brakes may not be able to handle it! Instead, astronauts have been servicing it in space.
Per that original plan, the original decommissioning plan was to bring it back to Earth and place it in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Now it will likely be deorbited over the South Pacific sometime between 2012-2015, assuming the May 2008 repair mission succeeds.
Fun with Money
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The pricetag for the Hubble Space Telescope does not include all the repair missions undertaken by space shuttles to service and fix countless problems that were "missed" during its construction. The maintainence cost annually is over $200 million just to analyze and research Hubble's data and repair missions, to say nothing of the more considerable cost of the actual repair mission. With that said, the pricetag would be much higher had Hubble been launched at full efficiency, to say nothing of the breathtaking visuals we have received in return that are reminiscent of the Voyager space probes.
1990 Discovery astronauts launch huge $1.5 billion black hole (STS-31)
1993 Endeavor astronauts fix improperly made mirror that was causing "fuzziness" and add camera equipment
1995 People start forgetting about Space Telescope to watch Matlock finale
1997 Discovery astronauts upgrade infrared capabilities and other electronics (STS-82)
1998 People forget about Hubble Space Telescope altogether
1999 Discovery astronauts place Hubble in "Safe Mode" after gyroscope malfunctions. Decide not to buy Windows XP. (STS-103 )
2000 People forget what astronomy is
2002 Columbia installs better power system, cooling, solar panels, and better camera. (STS-109)
2002 Better ACS camera promptly gets cooler picture of Hubble Ultra Deep Field
2004 Lousy spectrograph breaks
2005 NASA forgets "we had that thing up there"
2008 Space shuttle Discovery will "drop by" to dump $900 million and repair equipment