There’s so much crap up there. Are there any regulations or can billionaires start fucking up space now too?
And it’s only going to get worser.
Honestly, Hubble is old, very old. It was based on a spy satellite that the US developed in the 70s, we built 5 of them. There were essentially 5 hubbles looking down at the earth and only 1 looking up.
But those spy satellites were retired years ago, they’re 4 generations old now. Since then, we’ve gradually launched 14 other spy sats to replace them.
All that is to say, why are we still content with our 1 ancient Hubble telescope? Clearly there is a budget for more. If the military can point 19 satellites down at the earth, surely we should be able to point 5 upward, right?
Yeah, the Hubble is struggling up there in LEO, but this isn’t a hubble problem, it’s a US prioritization problem. You get what you pay for, and apparently we’re only willing to pay for war.
You’ve heard of JWST right?
Oh absolutely! But why not more?
Why are scientists around the globe competing for small chunks of time on the jwst when we could have several more telescopes like it? Or perhaps even a few slightly less advanced telescopes. I know designing it was a huge challenge, but even with the design complete, just constructing it presented a number of serious challenges. Given that the jwst was such a complex project, I wonder if a series of telescopes with optics and instruments still significantly more modern than Hubble would still be useful to astronomers as well as much easier to produce than the jwst.
Because learning about the universe is unlikely to have any short-term gains for people making budget decisions on this scale
I think that’s probably right. But personally, I want more and I think it’s worth caring about, worth encouraging people to think about.
I was also going to reference the Chandra XRay telescope, but holy shit, I had no idea it was almost 27 years old
I have models of both Hubble and Chandra telescopes hanging in my room. 😃
It’s a great telescope, it made a whole slew of discoveries possible. But yeah, digital imaging has improved a lot over the last 27 years, do you remember what digital cameras were like in 1998?
What we have is great, and what we’ve managed to do with it is astonishing. But… I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice by not updating these space observatories more frequently and by not building enough of them for all of the observations we want to make. Because we could, but we aren’t.
Lol, wait until Elon and everyone else sets off the Kessler Syndrome. There won’t be shit up in the sky after that.
Nono, there’ll be tons of shit, but not the usable kind.
Starlink satellites are too low to pose that problem. They’re designed to deorbit in 5 years, anyway. Broken ones would probably do so even sooner
When other debris hits them or parts of them break off, some fragments will have lower mass and slightly different trajectory and therefore may change into higher orbit.
therefore may change into higher orbit.
Not really. They may go into a higher orbit temporarily, but they would be highly elliptical, repeatedly dipping into the atmosphere and bleeding speed
Those pieces would still have their original low periapsis and deorbit pretty quick. Kessler syndrome isn’t about very low orbits where drag is significant
And simply due to physics, those will be the exception and not the rule, and so not enough to cause Kessler Syndrome.
The real problem with those satellites is the immense amount of pollution that is released in the atmosphere due to them burning up. It could bring back our ozone hole problem.
What are they releasing when they burn up that would cause that much pollution?
It’s the burning aluminum that will be the problem if it turns out to be more than theoretical…
Luckily a lot of the cheap startup stuff is going to LEO, so the real junk that dies early or never makes contact should do the same.
Looks my photo of Orion nebula! No but seriously, like 80% of the frames I took had satellite streaks. It’s becoming a rather difficult target to photograph, at least relative to my place on Earth. Sucks to see this likely to become true for Hubble too.
So much space junk up there…eventually it will be impossible to leave earth without risking a hit from a screw travelling 50k miles per hour
Just like Wall-E.
Wasn’t Earth just over polluted so humanity had left?
And they eventually went back because they learned staying in space was a mistake.
But I don’t remember the part about the orbits being so crowded or full of trash that you cannot grt on or off planet
Eve spacecraft goes through quite a few dead spacecrafts when escaping Earth
Now rewatching it is hard not to notice how stationary the space junk appears in that scene.
In which case it would all be falling to earth.
Either that or it’s all moving at the same orbital speed at the launching ship and the ship is actually spiraling out from the planet, not launching directly into deep space.
That’s not how Kessler Syndrome works.
I remember reading the world books for the Rifts RPG by Palladium.
A version of what you describe is why you can’t leave earth in a space ship easily
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Oh wow. I assumed the Hubble was like in a Lagrange point or something, not LEO
That would be JWST orbiting arround lagrange pt. 2, (well, there’s been lots of observatories and stuff, but it’s the current famous one)
At the time of Hubble’s launch there was no vehicle capable of lifting that mass to a Lagrange point. Also, it would have been way more expensive, had less operational life and any servicing mission been impossible.
It’s low enough orbit that a space shuttle mission went to repair it shortly after it was launched.
It was launched by Discovery and serviced by Shuttle missions five times. The last was in 2009.
Yep, that’s where the shuttle could reach it.
Hubble had 5 servicing missions from the Shuttle before it’s retirement. The Shuttle was only capable of LEO missions.
There’s research into the possibility of using something like Crew Dragon for additional maintenance missions to extend it’s service life even further.
Can we use it to focus/reflect sunlight onto a specific spot, then have it turn on and off again a lot in a little planetary rave?
Slightly less research has been done to investigate that possibility, I’ll get back to you.
you know all those uranus jokes had me thinking space people were cool. i gotta downgrade all astronomers one point just for nobody researching that
Yeah, it’s a little weird that it’s in Leo. Seems like further out would be a better choice.
It would be higher up if we built it today.
Is there any feesible plan for removing all the space junk? Has any authority that’s reliable put forth a plan that could actually work?
Europe, ESA, and a good amount of space actors have signed the zero debris charter that aims to increase the accuracy at which satellites are to deorbit when their activities have seized and to prevent space debris in a preventative approach.
ESA also has active plans to recover or extend space operations of satellites that needs servicing via its RISE-mission.
Finally, there are also the CAT and Clearspace-1 missions (amongst others?) which intend to actively remove satellites from orbit, or place them in the graveyard orbit.
Oh, and space lasers (for monitoring space debris).
I guess there are more, but I think this already shows it is actively being developed.
I thought they were using space lasers to accelerate debris into a decaying orbit
Multipurpose lasts?
How about:
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Stick them somewhere out of the way, like the dark side of the Moon.
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Use multiple space telescopes and build a composite image.
Ze dak side of ze moon!
You mean stick the Hubble on the dark side of the moon? That’s a little difficult.
The small satellites swarming everywhere can’t be stuck out of the way. They’re communications satellites. They need to be close by to reduce latency.
You mean stick the Hubble on the dark side of the moon?
Space telescopes in general. Somewhere that isn’t LEO; I grabbed that as an example because I recall it being needed for…IIRC it was radiotelescopes, to avoid communications chatter. Might not be ideal for optical telescopes.
The two biggest problems with observatories on the far side of the moon are being limited to only half of space (the same as planetary observatories) and the cost to build it. You can mitigate the first by having observatories on opposite edges of the far side, but that also costs twice as much as building one.
There’s also the issue with communicating with the satellite. Hard to do that with thousands of kilometers of rock in the way
And yet, I can use satellites to communicate on the other side of the world. I have a suspicion the same system would work for this.
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For future missions they could probably detect a sat pass by an obvious bright dot moving in a straight line and then prevent that small area from being added to output photo. It would still be an issue for Hubble and a range of other older telescopes but some newer ones could receive a software update given the HW could handle the change.
FWIW, what you described is done by hobby astrophotographers. Satellite rejection during stacking:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51169334733_c2f9b44508_o.png
If you detect it the image is already ruined. You need to predict where it’ll be.
