A HUBBLE BUBBLE?
I have heard a disturbing rumor recently saying that the celebrated Hubble Telescope - one of the truly great achievements of our generation - has been tagged by some as being "obsolete".
True enough, the Hubble has been out there since 1990 which is a long time in space gadget aging, and I will agree whole heartedly that it "has done itself proud”, and, thus, in a sense, made itself age beyond its years by the sheer immensity of information it has given us... far more than man of the most optimistic among us expected.
Hubble, you might recall, had a rather dismal birth when it was placed out there at six hundred kilometers away. That’s a mere three hundred and seventy-five miles which is just down the street a few block in space distance counting. You will remember that a major glitch was revealed at the time, becase the lens mounted in the telescope was of the wrong size or type. Many critics at the time, said that would doom the project but service mission was successful and even severe critics were won back to the fold of Hubble believers. The visionary modular design of the Hubble craft allows visiting astronauts to replace worn parts as they are needed, to make precise adjustments shown to be helpful by work the Hubble has been doing thus far. The count is out of date as I type, but the Hubble telescope has made a total of around three-hundred an d thirty thousand observations and relayed about twenty-five thousand photographs back to Earth for study, Someone has calculated that the information sent back by the telescope would fill your home computer every day for about ten years. Scientific scribblers have written about three thousand scientific papers for various publicaitions and the Hubble has traveled about l.5 billion miles - the distance for Earth to Uranus. It circles the Earth every 97 minutes and shows no signs of slowing down or stopping.
If it needs repair or servicing of any kind it’s close enough for us to do the work promptly and efficiently. The solar wings the Hubble wears were added in 1993 and enlarged by another service mission in 1997, Those wings are the largest structures every replaced in orbit. In a mechanical sense, the Hubble Telescope has been kept in a modern , state-of- the-art condition.
I have rather strong suspicions criticism is most often founded on petty political points. We will need to be careful during this election year when such faulty information downgrading any current project is bandied about quite freely and often accepted as Truth.
Inform yourself. Be prepared to “say it isn’t so.”
A.L.M. January 23, 2004 [c459wds]
