NASA’s iconic Hubble Observatory has years of life left, and ideas are in the works to perhaps keep it going longer — but those proposals could face uphill battles.
The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, has been serviced five times by astronauts and remains in good health. But the telescope is aging and slowly falling toward Earth because of the atmosphere’s natural drag, which is why billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman helped spearhead a proposal to send a maintenance mission to the telescope to the first time since 2009.
Isaacman – the commander of the private Inspiration4 mission in 2021, which he also supported financially – is also the funder and an astronaut of the Polaris program. Polaris is a three-mission private astronaut series flying with SpaceX hardware and plans to conduct the first-ever commercial spacewalk this year, with Polaris Dawn.
The Polaris program’s Hubble proposal was first made public in 2022, and NASA asked other companies to also send ideas as part of a Request for Information (ROI) that was issued. closed in early 2023. There have been no official updates on the return on investment yet, but the case recently reappeared in the news with a report from National Public Radio. The broadcaster obtained internal NASA emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, showing a range of reactions including concerns from some people about the risk to Hubble.
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Hubble’s last servicing mission in 2009 was a difficult decision for NASA. The agency, working in the wake of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster that claimed the lives of seven astronauts, initially canceled the planned maintenance mission. Their concern was that the Space Shuttle Atlantis would not be able to reach the International Space Station for assistance, if needed, due to Hubble’s orbit being far removed from the orbital complex.
However, after the scientific community expressed its concerns, NASA reinstated the mission with reinforcement: another space shuttle, Endeavor, was put on the launch pad, ready to help Atlantis if necessary. The carefully choreographed maintenance mission needed no backup, however; it achieved its primary maintenance goals for Hubble, and the astronauts returned home without incident.
Hubble continues to make observations, following decades of groundbreaking work in areas ranging from the expansion of the universe to the exploration of global climate change.
However, Hubble cannot continue like this forever: instruments and systems age, the telescope periodically goes through “safe modes” (most recently for about a week in April), and drag from Earth’s atmosphere slowly pulls it down from its orbit of approximately 320 miles (515 kilometers). (For comparison, the ISS is about 250 miles or 400 km away.)
Additionally, the Space Shuttle and its large repair bay are no longer available; that program was retired in 2011, requiring new engineering solutions if anyone wanted to service Hubble again. The timeline for such a mission would likely require years of planning, and since there have been no updates on the proposals since 2023, the status of any potential new maintenance efforts is unclear .
Hubble’s core instruments and subsystems (such as solar panels and batteries) “will continue to operate until the late 2020s and perhaps into the 2030s”, assuming no have no unforeseen events, NASA officials said. Isaacman and the Polaris program, however, hope to keep Hubble operating much longer – perhaps for two more decades – via a servicing mission.
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NPR’s lengthy report highlighted several different positions from interviewees and emails, ranging from praise for Polaris’ innovation and for the quality of technical work, to concerns about certain things. Among these concerns were the fact that Polaris has not yet performed a spacewalk, that SpaceX EVA (extravehicular activity) suits have not yet been tested in space, that it is difficult to reach Hubble even for NASA astronauts and that any spacewalk near the telescope presents a risk of damage to it.
(Isaacman was not available for an interview with NPR due to his Polaris training program, SpaceX did not respond to NPR’s inquiries, and NASA sent brief statements to the broadcaster promising detailed follow-up publicly in near future. The European Space Agency, also a funder of the telescope, was not interviewed.)
The joint NASA-Polaris Hubble feasibility study has not yet been released, but “I hope it comes out,” Isaacman wrote on X (formerly Twitter), saying technical analysis had been carried out for six months and that a formal recommendation had been made.
Isaacman added that he worries that public discourse since then has, in his view, fallen wrongly into camps including “new space versus old space, or people who love SpaceX versus people who hate SpaceX, incompetent tourists against real astronauts.
Related: Photos: NASA Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions
“It should have been just the mission, because if a mission had been planned, it would have had resources from all the organizations that participated in the study to ensure its success,” Isaacman stressed.
“It’s not like anyone is going to fly it, especially after a joint study was done to broadly determine how a successful mission could be accomplished,” added Isaacman, whose resume includes more than 6,000 hours flying various aircraft, including time to deal with unforeseen circumstances. or perform flight training.
Isaacman paid tribute to past servicing missions managed by NASA. Each required several rounds of spacewalks as well as the replacement of major instruments and the use of the Space Shuttle’s Canadian robotic arm, called Canadarm. Planning for these missions would still take several years, including extensive spacewalk practice by the agency’s astronauts.
Advances in electronics over the past 15 years, however, mean that “these days you can pack a lot of functionality into a device the size of an iPhone,” Isaacman said.
As for the risk to Hubble of re-maintaining it, Isaacman said that aside from Hubble falling back to Earth, “many telescope systems have failed and most of the redundancies have been lost. That’s why it continues to disconnect”. “.
In a recent NASA statement, agency officials named a single faulty gyroscope as responsible for the April 2024 safe mode incident, along with another in November 2023. But there are still two others gyroscopes that Hubble can use to orient itself in space.
Even though three of Hubble’s six gyroscopes are no longer operational and the best efficiencies come from using at least three gyroscopes for pointing, the observatory “could continue to make scientific observations with a single gyroscope if necessary.” , indicates the press release. As for the near-term health of Hubble: “NASA anticipates that Hubble will continue to make groundbreaking discoveries,” the statement said.
Hubble, Isaacman said, could only be powered by Polaris until it reached a “certain altitude”, at which point (according to Isaacman) it would either fall uncontrolled back to Earth, or – if a rescue effort was desired at this point – it would have been solved by a robotic mission, which may be at taxpayer expense depending on what NASA wants to do.
“If a mission had been flown and I had been happy to fund it, I believe it would have resulted in the development of capabilities beneficial to the future of commercial space and, along the way, would have given Hubble a new life,” Isaacman added.
“I recognize that this is not my telescope to touch and a lot of time has passed since the study until now. Government priorities are changing, budgets are getting tight. No matter who funds the mission, it requires resource contributions from many parties to ensure success Regardless of what happens from here, I’m glad all of us, including NASA, invested the time to see if this could work. »