So maybe we don't send a lot of highly refined plutonium and uranium to the moon. Perhaps we lock it in some sort of mixture to prevent it from being dangerous even if it reentered earth's atmosphere. Once on the moon, it could be refined for use in a reactor... or a breeder reactor so that more fuel could be made nad less launched from earth.

Solar power will play a crucial role as well. Although the moon has 2 week long "nights," we could erect a series of solar collection sites connected by microwave transmission towers or by lunar satellites or even L4 and L5 orbiting solar stations. We'll also want to look into energy storage like advanced electrical batteries and flywheels.

If we need to look for radioactives on the moon, we'll probably need to dig fairly deep. Some colonization plans, mine at least, call for tunnel boring machines to dig out permanent subsurface habitats and for mining. These would probably be electrically powered from solar and stored-solar energy or they could be nuclear steam/electric. So we would need fissiles in order to get fissiles. BTW, some of those tunnels may eventually be used to transit between lunar bases or used for power transmission and communications instead of using surface relay towers. That way, there would be less interference for Farside radio observatories.

What if we just sent a lot of little bits of plutonium and uranium on each rocket instead of a couple big loads. It could be wrapped in lightweight foam with folding wing panels. If the launch failed it could be ejected and float down like Mir's Solar panels rather than burn up. I don't know if it would work, but I'm thinking about it. Let's think about how it can work instead of why it won't.

I wish I could go to NASA and help with these challenges, but I'm a synthesist and not a technician. I'm sure that they've got more than enough Ph. D's to solve these issues.

__________________
"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

This Idea of some politicans that you could know what research will give usefull results is completely nonsense.
Electricity was introduced as a plaything for frivolous partiy games. And for many, many decades no one even could imagine that there could be more useful applications.
Now about hubble. Hubble helped us to better understand the big bang - better understanding the big bang will help us to better understand particle physics. So far we know - only of theoretical interest? These next steps are unknown but supposable: Better understanding particle physics will help us finding a way to generate muons cheap and energy efficient. Creating muons this way will allow to do cold muon catalyzed nuclear fusion. cold muon catalyzed nuclear fusion will allow us to build fusion reactors of the size and costs of car engines. - Only of theoretical interest?

Of course you would be right if this would be the only possible way. But why launch this heavy material and the added weight of all these complicated safety additions when you find the same stuff on the moon where you need it?

Why do you think so? Because of its chemical affinities uranium is mostly found in the light crustal rocks. Due to the less density of the moon there should be more of this kind of material on the moon then on earth. And the uranium rich rocks will not be buried under thick sedimantary rocks like on earth. I think you will have good chances to get uranium on the moon even on open cast mining. And you will have no safety or enviromental problems by doing that.

Have you a reference you can cite for this? From what I've read, the Moon is woefully short on all of the heavier elements.

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T. Anderson

I admit I don't know if and where radioactives may be on the moon. It'd be great if they were within easy reach on the surface. Or would the energetic solar wind have any effect on surface radioactives? I honestly haven't looked that far into it.

I read that the moon's core is off-center toward the earth. If it is so, then is that a cause or an effect of tidal motion and synchronicity? Was the Lunar core always off center, and did this determine which face of the disc we see? Or was the interior plastic long enough for the core to migrate out of position. If it migrated in a fluid evironment did that environment exist simply because of impact heat or were radioactives keeping it warm deep inside?

Either way we'll probably need fission on the moon. Later we may try fusion and other forms of energy production. When I think about it, I wonder if the moon will end up a giant city like the fictional "Coruscant" in the Star Wars movies. We'll all be a little bit taller there and those jedi leaps may just be possible.

__________________
"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

I don't think I can give you a direct quote on the whole Idea.
From a german physics textbook (Bergmann, Schaefer) I got this:
Planet..............Density (kg/m^3)
............observed....corrected for standard temperature and pressure
Earth.......5515..........4100
Moon.......3340..........3400

On the first glimpse you would say: Ah less density means less heavy elements. But this only holds for the more abundant elements like oxygen, silicium, magnesium, aluminium and iron. Uranium is by far to seldom to have such a direct effect.
The next you will get from astrophysics textbooks. In accordance with the impact theory of moons formation this density variation means that the moons material came mainly from earts crust and mantle, and less from the core.
Now you need some geology - where is uranium found? My physics textbook (Bergmann, Schaefer) says uranium is highly enriched in lighter crustal rocks wich are created by partialy melting of former mantle material.
Bergmann, Schaefer gives this table, too

Planet...........estimated average abundance of
....................Uranium in Crust and Mantle in ppb:

Earth.....................20 - 26
Moon.....................20 - 30

This means slightly more uranium on moon, But on the other hand moon is less differentiated then earth and this means more uranium poor mantle rocks dirctly on the surface but this may be counterbalanced by no uranium poor sedimentary rocks like limestone on the surface.
so you may expect to find as much uranium on the moon like on earth.

On the other hand the samples we have brought back from the moon are, so far as I know, very poor in uranium. But with the little number of probes we have you would have the same effect on earth to for statistical reasons because uranium ores are very rare.

Actually, I think the Mars rovers are right on target. They are new, fresh, and have a purpose with regard to a permanent infrastructure on space and ultimately manned missions to Mars. Along with the search for life, we will learn if the soil can support the kinds of power and life support structures we want to put there for people to go.

Having 2 of them just makes sense, it's "mission critical" type of stuff.

My point is that Hubble is outliving it's usefulness, and relies on the shuttle, which needs to be replaced. If it means sacrificing Hubble now to get more later, let it go. It's just a different philosophy that one takes. In my business, each building we build anew is greatly improved on the previous building. After a certain amount of time, we stop going back to our older buildings and upgrading everything. Ultimately, we sell them off to other private sectors to do with what they need.

I don't need a lecture of basic business economics any more than I need to be told that public companies do not run more leanly than the government. "Common knowledge" or not, your example only outlines my example more clearly. Every contractor knows that getting a cushy government contract is just what they need. But in the private sector, we squeeze contracts for every last penny. And get it.

Trying to think this through practically rather than emotionally, I am thinking this argument makes a lot of sense.

Sure, I'd love to see Hubble live on to it's fullest potential. Realistically, there are gives and takes in life, and often times sacrifices have to be made. You still hate it, but, well, you know that expression about having your cake and eating it too? I wish I could do both all the time, but I have to accept that I can't.

The shuttles have been great, but aren't they overdue for newer ships?

Hubble, I think, got caught in the transition mix. When transitioning to upgrades in anything, unfortunately good things get scrubbed early or scrubbed completely or re-focused. It's tough, but - well, that's all a part of life.

Did NASA's mission need to be upgraded? Well, there is a case for it. Times change, people change, intentions change. Aren't there expressions about how things that don't bend will break?

We can argue politics and finances and what-not on this issue til the cows come home, but sometimes we have to accept that we can't see all the variables and hope that it all works out for the best in the end.

I'll be sorry to see Hubble's life cut short. But at the same time, the possibility of sci-fi dreams of humans travelling through space comming into the picture once again - hey, that's exciting, too. Isn't it?

Kind-of see what I'm saying?

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

I agree with the above two posts about HST. I was a big fan of it when it launched and I am always happy when new pictures come out. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that in order to keep servicing it requires the Shuttle, which I pointes out earlier is simply not an option. As valuable as HST is to the scientific community it is simply not worth risking 7 human lives. I would love to see new better space telescopes in the future and I expect that it will happen eventually. I also agree that if an international consortium with the money to maintain it wanted to buy it, that might be an interesting solution, but I am not sure how realistic that is, it would be pretty expensive with little monetary payoff.

Couple more things of note, regarding the decision not to fly another servicing mission to the HST.

First, I was reading an article about this on www.space.com today, and they mentioned that one of the requirements of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board was that NASA not only had to have a repair system in place for a Shuttle flying to service Hubble, but they also had to have a second Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, ready to go immediately if there were problems. So, NASA would have had to spend a fortune to develop those free-flight repair capabilities for one single mission, then would have to spend another large sum of money ($500 million minus the post-flight refurbishment costs) to have a second Shuttle standing by, ready for launch.

Which brings me to my second point.....Hubble is basically a modified KH11 spy satellite turned the other way. It's not exactly new technology, here, despite the numerous upgrades. Rather than spend all that money on one more refurbishment flight, it seems prudent to me to look into building a follow-on bird with improved optics in the visual light range.

Third, I was reading Scientific American a couple months back, which mentioned the capabilities of ground-based observatories are rapidly approaching, and in some cases, surpassing Hubble. While the HST was launched in 1990, its underlying technology is much older.

Lastly, the HST stands a good chance of failing before we could make repairs, anyway. That's a good indicator that it's time to focus on successors.

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Ok, with no more servicing missions planned, what's going to happen when the Hubble's orbit decays? Is it going to result in drbris raining down in some unpredictable location ala Skylab?

Are we talking about the same hubble that was launched blind and had to be fixed in orbit?


While it may have been a great piece of equipment how much of an advance did it make? Would these things never have been accomplished without it?

Compare it to all of the technology that was developed by NASA to send people into orbit or to the moon. It seems to me (a non scientist) that the greater return for the investment is something that may have a real impact on people. The stars they are going to be there tomorrow. What is 2 or 3 years in the life of a star anyway? People's lives however could be positively affected by developments from these manned programs almost over night. The andvances in engineering and manufacture would be felt very quickly but how does knowing that the universe is 14 billion years old rather than 13 billion help us right now. Science for science's sake is great and interesting and all but the general population really does want something for there tax dollars not just some data that a few(myself included but not most of the population) finds interesting. For instance I think it is cool to know how old the universe is but joe blow is more interested in that new composite material that makes his life better.

I say go to the moon, go to mars. Exploration breeds scientific inquiry. Think about all the exterrestral geologists that will sprout up from our studies of mars, science for science's sake will come following the exploration. Thanks. Just my opinion.

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Posting for myself now

Well, we could shoot it down with an ASAT from the BMD program. Hubble could even take a picture of it at the same time. Then the footage could be sold to the James Bond people for inclusion in the next movie. Hollywood saves the space program!

__________________
"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

Quite a bit and probably not -- or at least not as quickly. It could be argued that because of HST we gained quite a bit of experience in deconvolving difficult images, and it spurred on the adaptive optics revolution.

It never was simply science for science's sake. It has done observations that simply could not (and in some cases still cannot) be done from Earth, no matter how good your AO system is. I wouldn't look down my nose at its ability to look back as far back in space in time as it has...

How does a Spam in a Can mission to the Moon help us right now? Or a rush job to get to Mars?

You are right that exploration breeds scientific inquiry. But, as I have learned first hand in my own research, it isn't always necessary to climb into a space ship to explore the cosmos.

__________________
Starry, starry night...

My site TheSpacewriter.com
and my blog: TheSpaceWriter's Ramblings

Gastronomy versus Spice Exploration

So there was this guy once, who was all like "dude, why do we need to hire remotes to go to China and draw us pictures and maybe send back a sample of silk and spices and stuff?"

His bro was all like, "Cuz that's what people want. They got tigers and lions and cannibals and all that strange stuff, man. Who would want to actually go there and risk life and limb?"

And the first guy, Chris, said "No way, man. We need some serious spice-age. This living vicariously stuff is for the brits. We gotta go there for ourselves."

And his bro up and said, "Nah, man we don't need no spice program. I'm all cozy here and don't wanna go exploring."

But Chris could not be daunted. He went out and got all sweet with the queen of Spain an' she gave him some money and some ships to go check it out.

Again, his bro was again all like, "Dude, that's not real explorin', you're all into the money and doing it for political gain. You know Isa and Ferd are just using you to further their conquest of Spainland. Besides you don't know how far away it is... you might not make it."

But Chris was not up in all that. "I'm cool with that possibility. If we fail, we fail. But at least I'm gonna try. Who knows, maybe I'll find something even better. Wouldn't that be a hoot!"

"It would indeed"

And so the gallant explorer sailed off for China and the west indies and the rich spicelands of legend. And darn it if he never made it. But at least he found a land full of promise and beauty and plenty. And this Italian brought back tomatoes, which when cooked with spices made a great sauce for Pizza. So you see, the spice exploration program gave us so much more than simple gastronomy ever could imagine.

@2004 JPax

__________________
"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

=D>

__________________
"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

Probably a dumb question, but, how useful would salvaging the solar panels for use in the ISS be? NASA is planning to launch a motor to de-orbit the Hubble, would the cost be about the same for one to change orbit to meet the ISS, have the occupants spacewalk and remove the panels/attach to the ISS, then de-orbit, or even attach the entire satellite to the ISS for experimental purposes? Would there be any benefit over just building and launching new panels up to the ISS? I realize that vibrations from the ISS would probably prevent the Hubble from doing much if it was attached to the ISS, someone can probably come up with something to do with it.

Seen on \. today:

Space Tug to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's Rescue?



The interesting thing about this idea is that last paragraph quoted above - this would be a commercial servicing mission. Has that ever been done before?

Good point Alan. If we're going to the expense of lifting a booster to deorbit Hubble, why not boost it to an ISS compatible orbit?

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

i mentioned this a page or 2 back, sell it off, make it a profit center, not an expense center.

they will not, and no one will buy. VW buses were cute after the 60's too, but no one took them as serious vehicles.

The challenge would mostly be changing the inclination (which is tough) from Hubble's 28 degrees to ISS's 51.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Yes, I am aware that most of the delta v would be in the change in inclination rather than the change in altitude. I was just wondering if it was feasible. After all, the plan is to lift a robot booster to Hubble to deorbit it. Why not lift a booster with enough delta v to redirect the orbit into an ISS compatible one?

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Noise abatement.

I haven't see this posted yet.

Scientists vow to keep Hubble alive.

DJ, I'm afraid you are laboring under a misconception. Actually, many, many misconceptions. It sounds to me like you have formed an opinion about Hubble without actually having talked to an astronomer, or anyone else.

I am an astronomer. I used Hubble for ten years; 5 for my PhD (using 3 separate instruments) and five more after that calibrating and using STIS (and using WFPC2 and NICMOS). I also have written many articles about Hubble, and have talked to literally thousands of people in the public about it. I think I am objectively qualified to have an informed opinion. So let me tackle some of the things you've said:

This was your first post in this thread, and is fraught with errors.

Hubble has been upgraded several times since launch. In fact, the cameras onboard now are cutting-edge. ACS has a 16 megapixel camera that is incredibly well-designed. My friends who work on it would laugh if you called it 70s technology.

The pretty pictures are more than the maven of the media. I'll return to that shortly.

And Hubble has been expensive, for sure. It may even be the most pricey astronomical instrument ever built. But it has hardly been a black hole for big dollars. It's cost is minor compared to the ISS (care to name any science that's come out of that?), for example. And the term "black hole" implies nothing has come out of it. Far from being a black hole, or returning "limited science" Hubble has brought us quite a bit.

Hubble science has run the range of astronomy, from data on the Moon and planets to nearly the farthest reaches we can see. Alan Boyle, of MSNBC, has an excellent article on a small slice of what Hubble has done. A search on the NASA journal database (here) returned over 17,000 papers with "HST" (Hubble Space Telescope) in their abstracts. Limited science indeed.

Hubble had very little to do with keeping the Shuttle. The Space Station is the reason the Shuttle has stayed around as long as it has. On what data did you form your opinion? It's wrong.

Then you said, as a repeated rebuttal to real science returned by Hubble:
The same can be said about you. What have you cured lately? Why should we keep you around?

Nothing personal there (really!); I am making a point. How many of us have cured anything? Why should that be the end-all-and-be-all of a project?

Now, if you want tangibles returned by Hubble, then I'll point you to the camera industry. Cheap, inexpensive CCDs, the detectors used in digital cameras, are a spinoff of Hubble technology. The detectors used in Hubble's WFPC and WFPC2 cameras were difficult and expensive to make, and engineers learned how to make them cheaper, better, and more reliable. The improvement in CCD tech in just a few years between WFPC 1 and 2 is amazing. I've used both cameras, and I can tell you the technology was drastically increased. That knowledge was not lost.

That's one example. There are lots more.

Nonsense. All it needs are new gyros. They are moving parts, like tires on a car. They wear out, and need to be replaced. But the cameras on board are doing quite well, and the new cameras waiting in the wings (WF3 and COS) are in many ways even better.

And your qualifications for saying that are...? Maybe you should talk to an actual astronomer. But wait! I'm one! Hubble has at least a decade of good use left in it, and probably more. I know lots and lots of astronomers, and I have not heard a single one say that Hubble is obsolete and should be trashed.

But do you tear down a perfectly good building just because you can make the new one out of better materials, even if the old materials still perform their job perfectly? Your analogy won't fly. If a building still works, you use it.

And what of those images I mentioned earlier? Like the one of the Eagle Nebula, which appeared in many major news magazines? Pictures like that are pretty indeed, but they also touch many people deeply, giving them a sense of awe and wonder. The Hubble Deep Field, when explained to schoolkids, routinely yields gasps of amazement from them. It puts them in contact with the Universe. Many people say our kids are jaded, fading away from reality. I wonder. When I give out Hubble images after public talks, the kids' eyes light up. It gives them a much-needed sense of majesty, of seeing that the Universe is an amazing place, and that we can study it, understand it, put ourselves in it. That's worth a lot. A whole lot.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Peoples' viewpoints are limited to what they have experienced, and I think your experience is limited when it comes to Hubble. I have a decade's worth of experience using Hubble, both as a research tool, an educational tool, and a tool to instill magic into kids' hearts. That experience tells me that pretty much everything you have posted in this thread is wrong. Hubble is still a valuable and useful tool, and it would be a real shame if we had to lose it.

The hubble Space Telescope is not a waste.

However, it does resemble a waste paper basket with that hinged-lid and all... :-)

__________________
"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

Well said Phil.

Thanks Phil. =D>

You took the words right out of my mouth -- I've been busy offline with several projects and haven't had a much of a chance to get back to this thread.

But, that being said, I also spent time on an HST team while in grad school, and ultimately wrote a book about HST that did pretty well. In the beginning even I was skeptical that HST COULD be fixed (this was in the deep, dark days right after spherical aberration was diagnosed on HST's main mirror). But, the more I saw what science was being done (and NOT reported about in the mainstream media), the more I impressed I was with the work-arounds and ultimately the technology used to correct HST's vision. It's been gravy ever since the first servicing mission, really. And I mean gravy in a good way...

This became such a driving interest of mine that I also did a master's thesis in science journalism on the subject of the media treatment of HST. What I found was that the first few years the telescope was doing good science, it went unreported in the mainstream media, or, even more interestingly, for those several years, each time a good science result was reported, the writer/editor of the story would feel compelled to throw in some modifier about the "broken" Hubble Space Telescope. It took quite a while before such modifiers stopped getting used. In the meantime, those of us who were working on instrument teams knew the story and were frustrated about how the story was NOT getting told. It made me very cynical of the press, even to the point of doubting much of what gets reported publicly in other arenas -- like politics and economics.

But, getting back to HST, everything Phil has said is true and I often wonder just what good it has done him or me and the other half dozen or so science types who HAVE written books and articles trying to tell the story of HST's success, if the result is that we come on boards like this or run into naysayers in real life, examples of people who dismiss HST science without having bothered to educate themselves about the full story. It exists out there in books, on HST websites, the stuff gets used in Star Trek episodes fer crissakes! It's not like there's a science conspiracy to keep people from finding out about HST (or any other science mission). But folks do have to take responsibility for educating themselves before making statements like, "It's 70s technology that's outlived its usefulness." That sort of statement tells me that the utterer is living in a 70s world, or at least one where they expect knowledge to be spoonfed.

Count me in as another who has lectured many times about HST science in the larger astronomical context and who has met up with the same responses Phil describes among members of the public who DO enjoy seeing the images and DO ask intelligent questions because they DO want to know things. I mean, something as simple as a conversation with a bag boy at a supermarket checkout about astronomy led to the following exchange:

ME: Yes, paper will be fine thank you.

Bagboy: (noticing my astronomy tshirt depicting the moon) You into astronomy?

ME: yes, how about you?

Bagboy: Yeah. How about that HST, huh?

And he went on to tell me about how he'd seen the Hubble Deep Field picture in a book at the library and it really turned him on to astronomy. It was a great conversation. I've had many like it in airplanes, bank lines, star parties, planetariums, cruise ships, wherever....

Now that my HST book has gone into two editions and reprints, I've moved on to discuss lots of observatories' work in my new book, because there IS that large class of folks out there who want to KNOW about space and astronomy. And, because we are blessed with a magnificent array of ground-based AND spacebased observatories like European Southern Observatory and the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey and the Gemini installations and the Kecks and HST and Chandra and XMM and so many, many others, I've expanded my own views (and hopefully my readers') to as many wavelength realms as possible. That's all any of us who write about astronomy (and many who DO astronomy AND write about it) can hope for -- to provide the information for those who do want to take the time to find out what's happening.

So, don't tell me that HST hasn't done anything for anybody. If you want to start playing THOSE games, I've got a whole arsenal of current politicians and pundits we can start in on -- probably on somebody else's BBS.

Go read a few books about what's up there in space doing astronomy for us and what's down here on the planet, and where the trends in astronomy are and what the legacy of telescopes like HST and its predecessors in space (IUE, OSO, and many others) are -- and then come back here and convince the rest of us that HST isn't worth supporting any longer.

(Note: like Phil, I'm not aiming this personally at anybody here, but at the mindset that causes a person to dismiss a working observatory with a handwave and a sniff of disdain because he or she hasn't taken the time to find out just what's current. The point of this missive isn't to sell more books (although I and the other authors would all love you for it) but to point out that the methods and means for educating oneself are out there... )

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Starry, starry night...

My site TheSpacewriter.com
and my blog: TheSpaceWriter's Ramblings

Yay BA!! =D>

=D> Absolutely. There is no disputing the science, but that's maybe even more important. And talk about solving humanities ills, maybe one of those kids who awakens to the wonder of science will go on one day to solve them!

One of my favorite Steven J. Gould essays was "Bully for Brontosaurus" where he talked about how great dinosaurs were for getting kids excited about science.

I think one of the things that shaped my love of science was Rachel Carson's book "The Sense of Wonder". The title says it all.

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