Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science

Must Hubble be saved?
Raoul — (archived)

Must Hubble be saved ?(Faut-il sauver Hubble?) is an article in the french magazine "Science et Vie".

Several points:

The HST has two failed gyros, the STIS camera isn't working anymore and NICMOS is wearing badly.

But there's more.

The HST hasn't made a major discovery and if it can't before it could be saved, then why save it at all?
(The furthest galaxy discovered and the first exoplanet picture come from the VLT; the whole sky at its birth is from Wmap; black holes are from Chandra, etc..).

Current unmanned and not man-tended telescopes (like Spitzer) cost 10 times less.

The HST was conceived just before the great advances in optoelectronics (CCD chips) and the advances in artificial intelligence: the ACS can get 16 millions pixels, but current earth based telescopes can go up to 320 millions pixels...
The CFHT from Hawai has a field 500 times greater thand the HST's. There are computers and shape recognition software capable of automatically treating 750 megabytes large pictures. Never could the HST conceivers imagine it would one day be possible to produce one image with one million galaxies and that a software could catalogue them all automatically, but also automatically detect all variable stars, all supernovae explosions, all gravitational lenses, all quasars. The HST can only look at a far smaller portion of the sky at any time.

Raoul

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