Game on.

poe-guard:

You get the biggest win ever for “HALELUJA ! comment edit !”. Priceless.

It’s grade school math really. The ISS has produced a quantity of 0 big science. When you multiply 0 by two you get – 0.

If NASA really wanted to screw us all they’d triple the so called “science” spend up on that most expensive science project ever conceived and launched.

@T_U_T- Sorry my man, bad idea in so, so many ways.

Making ISS more useful is probably the worst of them, isn’t it

I would think that any sort of cable will have weight and tug on Hubble as it’s trying to keep steady.

A nylon thread weights only a few gram. Its pull in microgravity would be infinitesimal.

Also, the thread could get tangled up on something on the station.

there is no wind in space. It can not tangle itself.

Also, the hubble will be spinning around itself so there is the danger of entanglement there.

Thac can be avoided by careful planning.

How do you gently slow it down before docking it to the station.

Simple air filled bag will do the trick.

Some sort of thruster module attached to the end of the hubble might be better.

That is of course a possibility too.

This is what is going to happen – the Hubble is going to give us another half decade or so of really amazing observations. Then it’s going to be de-orbited and we’ll all just pause and give our thumbs up to the old girl as she arcs a beautiful burn up on re-entry.

Then, hopefully, we’ll wake up the next day and hit the big red button at NASA that launches up the next fleet of successor ‘scopes that will amaze us even more.

I would think that any sort of cable will have weight and tug on Hubble as it’s trying to keep steady. Also, the thread could get tangled up on something on the station. Those solar panels are pretty huge. Sorry but your idea sounds a little fishy to me. Also, the hubble will be spinning around itself so there is the danger of entanglement there.

Also, how do you make sure that the hubble is pulled straight in to the mounting area. Once you start tugging it in, it’s going to come in at a speed, even if slow. How do you gently slow it down before docking it to the station. There is also the possibility that once you reel it in, it might come at a slight different angle and hit the station.

Some sort of thruster module attached to the end of the hubble might be better.

http://gigapica.geenstijl.nl/2009/05/bye_bye_hubble.html#more

So a soyuz goes out with a cable attached, connects it to the hubble. The hubble gets reeled in and gently docked to the station, orbit corrected and then towed back out by a soyuz again? Sounds tricky and rather bumpy for a precision instrument.

You may still attach small thrusters to the end of the cable and maneuver it to hubble. Or connect hubble to the space station permanently by a thin thread along which the cable will be pulled

And how far out from the station should the hubble be?

No clue how such a cable can be long. The longer the better.

Closest I ever got at liftoff was on the causeway linking Canaveral with the mainland. (That’s where the big countdown clock is.) We were seated on top of a van. When the sound reached us, the whole van started shaking, as if an earthquake were rocking us back and forth.. A guy next to us used to come see the Saturn 5s go off. He said the shuttle couldn’t compare.

Now that I would love to have seen…and felt.

So a soyuz goes out with a cable attached, connects it to the hubble. The hubble gets reeled in and gently docked to the station, orbit corrected and then towed back out by a soyuz again? Sounds tricky and rather bumpy for a precision instrument.

And how far out from the station should the hubble be?

But the inclination difference between hubble and ISS is 22.5 degree. so you will need at least 38 % of orbital velocity. So for hubble rescue you will nedd 20 times delta V which is required for deorbiting. But. For deorbiting you will have to use conventional rocket which is 30 times less efficient in terms of ISp. so, you will need only 66.6 % of fuel for hubble rescue. So I stay by what I said. Rescue is cheaper than deorbiting.

Of course during ion engine operation the telescope can not take pictures. So it has to be scheduled after the telescope stops working to prevent loss of useful operation time.

To get the Hubble into such an orbit would be enourmously expensive (in terms of fuel), because orbital plane changes require a large change in velocity. Even with an ion engine, it would require years of thrusting and thousands of pounds of fuel. I don’t think Hubble could do observations while the engine was on, due to oscillations. If the thrust vector wasn’t dead on through the center of gravity, it would tend to make the telescope rotate, which would require constant corrections by the gyroscopes, wearing them out prematurely and inducing a constant wobble instead of steady pointing.

JWST is going to be launched to a distant orbit (IIRC at the L2 point like Herschel and Planck), far outside the Moon’s orbit. This makes sense because it is an infrared telescope and you want to keep it away from warm objects like the earth. However, it isn’t really a replacement for Hubble which is primarily and optical and near UV telescope, and doesn’t mind the heat of the Earth nearly so much. It might well make sense to launch any future true replacement telescope (optical and UV) into an orbit coplaner with the ISS to
make maintenance easier, but I know of no such plans.