Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Must Hubble be saved?

Hurts to say it...
R.L. — (archived)

But saving the HST is probably not the wisest thing to do now... It was a wonderful instrument and it did a great job, but it is antiquated. When the HST was designed and built (it was first scheduled to launch in 1986) ground based telescopes with adaptive optics (AO) were just a dream...

The development of AO was an incredible advance for ground based astronomy- essentially allowing ground based telescopes to ignore the effects of the atmosphere. They still had limitations even with AO... for instance they could only use AO on ~1% of the sky, and it was limited to the near infrared wavelengths. The advent of Laser Guide Star AO (LGSAO) in the past few years increased the sky coverage to ~%80 maybe more, the wavelength limitation still applies. Work is ongoing to extend adaptive optics to the visible wavelengths.

Currently, large telescopes like Keck outfitted with a LGSAO system routienely outperform the HST in the near infra-red... we achieve resolution several times that of the HST. Keck is currently the only large telescope with such a system in service, but several more telescopes are going to have such a system in the next few years. Gemini North will be the next one.

The wavelength restriction on AO is only a question of technology, and it is one that many are working on. The efforts to develop AO technology to the point that it can be extended to the visible wavelengths will succeed... there is no obvious reason why they cant...

The HST served its purpose... the money needed to rescue it would be better spent on a new space telescope or in improving ground based telescope technology.

Hubble currently only has the advantage in the visible and UV, that will change in the next decade. I have to say, sadly and with fondness: "Let it go"....

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