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from the is-that-a-question-or-a-challenge? dept.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an infrared space observatory with an $8.8 billion budget, will be transported to South America to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket, presumably in Spring 2019. The JWST was not intended to be serviceable at the Earth-Sun L2 point. Will there still be a "Golden Age of astronomy" even if the JWST fails?
[Due] to its steadily escalating cost and continually delayed send-off (which recently slipped from 2018 to 2019), this telescopic time machine is now under increasingly intense congressional scrutiny. To help satisfy any doubts about JWST's status, the project is headed for an independent review as soon as January 2018, advised NASA's science chief Thomas Zurbuchen during an early December congressional hearing. Pressed by legislators about whether JWST will actually launch as presently planned in spring of 2019, he said, "at this moment in time, with the information that I have, I believe it's achievable."
[...] Simply launching JWST is fraught with peril, not to mention unfurling its delicate sunshield and vast, segmented mirror in deep space. Just waving goodbye to JWST atop its booster will be a nail-biter. "The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky. The good news is that the Ariane 5 has a spectacular record," says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, a repeat "Hubble hugger" who made three space-shuttle visits to low-Earth orbit to renovate that iconic facility. Now scientist emeritus at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, he sees an on-duty JWST as cranking out science "beyond all of our expectations."
"Assuming we make it to the injection trajectory to Earth-Sun L2, of course the next most risky thing is deploying the telescope. And unlike Hubble we can't go out and fix it. Not even a robot can go out and fix it. So we're taking a great risk, but for great reward," Grunsfeld says.
There are, however, modest efforts being made to make JWST "serviceable" like Hubble, according to Scott Willoughby, JWST's program manager at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California. The aerospace firm is NASA's prime contractor to develop and integrate JWST, and has been tasked with provisioning for a "launch vehicle interface ring" on the telescope that could be "grasped by something," whether astronaut or remotely operated robot, Willoughby says. If a spacecraft were sent out to L2 to dock with JWST, it could then attempt repairs—or, if the observatory is well-functioning, simply top off its fuel tank to extend its life. But presently no money is budgeted for such heroics. In the event that JWST suffers what those in spaceflight understatedly call a "bad day," whether due to rocket mishap or deployment glitch or something unforeseen, Grunsfeld says there's presently an ensemble of in-space observatories, including Hubble, and an ever-expanding collection of powerful ground-based telescopes that would offset such misfortune.
Previously: Space science: The telescope that ate astronomy
Telescope That 'Ate Astronomy' Is on Track to Surpass Hubble
Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Delayed to Spring 2019
Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Could be Further Delayed
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 01 2018, @02:14PM (5 children)
Losing it all is a typical failure mode when you make only one spacecraft. In addition, one-off is great for contractors since most of the profit in such a spacecraft is in the low risk R&D with one-off having highest R&D costs per item.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:55PM (4 children)
It seems reasonable at this point of the space age, that they come to terms with the benefits of standardizing the size of the screws/bots/nuts etc and then put a remotely controlled robot on the ISS that can launch and return via the use of slow burning ionic thrusters that can be refueled due to there being a space station near by.
But yeah rocket surgery is hard so I won't say I have the answer. It just seems a lot of these horrendously expensive initiatives are not designed with the idea of even a slim chance of maintenance. What they did for the hubble was at first to overcome profound embarassment due to their mistake with the lenses... but it was within reach of a spacewalking human and they were able to fix it.
Setting this up for service panel accessibility of some kind for some of its parts (clearly not everything...) like for a future robotic probe that may not exist today, could at least provide the hope of maintenance some day. Just think, they could standardize the parts and plan for the future by including robot service probes to be designed with fittings that work with even older hardware in the off-chance they get the opportunity to diagnose and repair one!
but i guess we'll get our robot cars that display ads that cannot be disabled before that happens. funny how the future in comics never had that, but space robots were common...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 01 2018, @03:02PM (3 children)
For only about half of the cost of a second Hubble Space Telescope (HST). One-off repair missions aren't cheap either.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 01 2018, @03:21PM (2 children)
There's talk of including a space telescope attached or very close [popsci.com] to the new Chinese space station.
While that isn't so applicable to JWST which must be kept further away from Earth due to infrared sensitivity, it does mean that fixing it could be much easier since you're already blowing money sending humans there. Even if the space telescope is not free to target everything due to being attached to an orbiting space station... it will still have plenty of universe to look out. It may be possible to build the telescope using multiple launches in order to increase its mirror size.
Seems very similar in "scope" to WFIRST [wikipedia.org]:
I say that any new space station that doesn't have some kind of space telescope near it is a wasted opportunity (example: the planned international lunar space station). Ideally, space telescopes work out of the box and don't need servicing, but being serviceable by bots or humans gives some assurance that it will be made to work, allows coolant/propellant to be refilled, allows some future proofing since certain components could be upgraded, etc. With launch costs ($/kg and total cost) declining more in the near future, it should become easier to service something with a robot at least.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 01 2018, @03:47PM (1 child)
AMS-02 has been installed since '11. Its not an optical scope but a cosmic ray scope. Kinda an impressive machine... in some ways cooler than a optical scope. It suffers from an interesting problem in that being so huge there really isn't much that CAN be fixed by the astronauts even if they're just inches away. Sorta like if you sent me to Palomar as a repair boy there are very few failure modes where I could fix anything without a UPS delivery, and UPS delivery from NASA is planned years (decades?) in advance so if it breaks its broke for years if I need a part so if the whole mission is built around stuff that falls apart or is used up in a decade then keeping it near an ISS that can't fix it anyway doesn't really save much data. AMS-02 being a special case because it takes a crapton of power and bandwidth so you'd need something 1/4 the size of the ISS for infrastructure. Or 1/10 or whatever. Anyway its frigging huge.
There's also a small hobbyist optical telescope inside ISS and they look out the window on to the earth with it quite a bit.
Essentially you're arguing the microsat concept which NASA has been rocking for some years (decades?) now mostly too small to be useful for astronomy (so far) and mostly for RF communications experiments and stuff (think ham radio satellites). I would not be surprised, given the huge success of the multi decade microsat project, for "really freaking huge microsat" or "obese microsat" programs to start up in a decade or two and do a variety of things including exactly what you propose. If they eventually allowed large numbers of "obese microsats" perhaps the size of standard shipping containers, that would be astronomically interesting, especially if you had like 50 in orbit acting as linked interfereometers or something. But NASA takes it slow, so current microsats are all about 10cm on a size.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 01 2018, @04:10PM
Unless you can make your swarm of CubeSat telescopes work like a big one, then bigger is almost certainly better. There are plenty of roles for microsats/CubeSats, but we need ATLAST [wikipedia.org]/HDST [wikipedia.org]/LUVOIR [wikipedia.org] sized telescopes to observe exoplanets and other faint objects. The bigger the better, and if they could be made relatively cheaply to match falling launch costs, that would be nice too.
Although Hubble-sized telescopes are no longer state-of-the-art (Herschel [wikipedia.org] and JWST are bigger), having more of them, especially ones covering large fields of view (such as the Chinese one or WFIRST), means that a lot of useful observations will get done. If we had a hundred of them, they would all be 100% utilized with the proper planning.
Let's get more stuff like TESS [wikipedia.org] up. Total cost seems to be around $160 million.
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