General Question

Samantha4One's avatar

Should there be a final service mission for Hubble space telescope?

Asked by Samantha4One (1328points) June 16th, 2022

As asked.

I know this is an old telescope, but i hope something could be done to give it a makeover.

Nasa is sending crews to ISS every now and then, then why can’t they do the same for Hubble service mission? Is it related to no space shuttle perhaps? Or something else.

Please share your thoughts on it.

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6 Answers

Tropical_Willie's avatar

NASA doesn’t think so. . .

“The Hubble Space Telescope was reborn with Servicing Mission 4 (SM4). The fifth and final servicing of the orbiting observatory flew aboard space shuttle Atlantis (STS-125) May 11–24, 2009.”

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/index.html

Hawaii_Jake's avatar

Evidently, they are going to keep using it for many years. Link

ragingloli's avatar

Yes, one where they replace the H with an R.

LuckyGuy's avatar

Think back…. waay back to 1990. If you had one here’s how your cell phone looked. 1990 phone
What did your computer look like? What electronics did you have then?
The Hubble was launched in 1990. That is the tech inside.
Are you still using your first iPhone 2G? Nope. That was 2007!
The point is, technology has changed a lot. It has gotten so much better! Orders of magnitude better! I can’t wait to see the magic from the recently launched James Webb telescope. It will make the Hubble look like an old Instamatic.

ragingloli's avatar

@LuckyGuy
Even worse.
Space missions are planned years, sometimes decades in advance, and the technology used is locked in at the beginning of the project, to ensure maximum reliability, which you would not get if you “updated” the tech in the middle of the project.
The Hubble project itself started in 1978, so the tech used is also that old, if not older, since you might not want to bet everything on the as of yet unproven “cutting edge”.

Zaku's avatar

@LuckyGuy @ragingloli Except that it’s still a large and powerful telescope, in space, which is still functioning, and its data can be used with whatever tech you want as long as it can receive that data. If the 1978 electronics work to get the images from that telescope, and it’s not cheap to deploy new comparable telescopes to space, then it’s still a valuable asset.

So despite your irrelevant consumerist smartphone-based scorn, as @Hawaii_Jake ‘s link from NASA says, “NASA anticipates that Hubble will last for many more years and will continue making groundbreaking observations, working in tandem with other space observatories including the James Webb Space Telescope to further our knowledge of the cosmos.”

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