(Que Lee, this takes place in direct sunlight, so the stars in the background are too faint, relatively speaking, to be seen)

But why does the earth not move quickly like you see in other space videos?

We need more Knowledge for All, and less Power for the Few.

Yes, using the orbiter to bring Hubble back would not be a trivial cost, but much cheaper than constructing a whole new vehicle.

As I pointed out. Moving it slowly to the international space station via attached ion thrusters would be cheaper in terms of mass that needs to be launched to the orbit. But everyone here dismissed the idea out of hand

Actually, the monoatomic oxygen at that altitude can be quite damaging. The LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility) experiment in the ’80s showed that quite dramatically. This was a hollow structure roughly the size of Hubble that had an exterior skin made up of all sorts of different materials. The mission was to bring it up on one shuttle, let it sit in orbit for six months or so, then bring it back on another. Unfortunately, one of the missions in between was the Challenger disaster, so it wound up orbiting for more than two years until the shuttles returned to flight. In fact, IIRC, retrieving it was the first new mission since its orbit had decayed to the point that it was about to reenter on its own. I believe pieces of it are on display at Air & Space.

The exposure duration was a lot longer than originally intended, and the surface looked really bad after only two years. Attack by oxygen was the main culprit in the deterioration of most of the materials.

- Jack

I’ve been singing that lament since high school, which has been more decades than I want to admit.

Strangely, the metric system IS the official measurement system of the US, thanks to Thomas Jefferson. TJ was a huge fan of the Rationalist movement in 18th Century Europe, and he made sure that the system was legally incorporated into our new government. However, the compromise in Congress was that we be allowed to legally continue using the Imperial system until the population could be educated and convinced of the superiority of metrics. Should only take a generation or two, he thought.

Beginning to sound like Texas all of a sudden.

- Jack

I think I heard something like September until they release the first pictures…. seems to be the beginning of a “hot autumn”, keeping in mind the (hopefully better than last time) start of the LHC…

Well, my point was that if proper attention is paid to decommissioning the shuttles they could be kept in flyable shape for some time. Of course you’d need a tank, pair of boosters, etc. so there’s a problem. An extra tank would need to be manufactured while the tooling and expertise still exists. If the Aries continues to be based on the Shuttle SRM then it wouldn’t be a big stretch to recreate those.

Yes, using the orbiter to bring Hubble back would not be a trivial cost, but much cheaper than constructing a whole new vehicle.

- Even though the shuttle requires manual operation now it really is just for landing as I understand it. Everything else is run by computers anyhow. Autolanding systems have gotten much, much better over the last 25 years so I bet one could be fit into it and work to bring her in.

- Snagging the telescope would be tough, but you’d have lots of time to do it. I can’t imagine it being too much harder than driving around Mars!

- As I understand it, the HST was originally intended to be brought back on the shuttle. That notion disappeared very early, however the telescope should still fit in the bay (yes mounting structures would have to be built). The only question I think would be the mass for landing. Rip out all of the crew support stuff (chairs, potty, food & water, oxygen, etc) and I bet you can get there.

Yes I know it’s just a dream … but it’s fun to think about.

(anybody want to pool on some Powerball tickets?)

It looks like a ring on a chain, so it’s probably his wedding ring. Many astronauts wear their wedding rings on chains around their neck.

Nuts, I can hear Gollum: “They took it from ussss! We wantsss it back! The preciousss….”

@ Michael L.

But I would guess, those fungi grew inside the MIR, hence in an environment that is filled with oxygen and water vapour. I don’t think those nasty things grew outside on a solar panel, e.g.

I’m surprised the first guy shown (with the mustache) was wearing that necklace/medal. It seems like it would be very annoying floating up into your face all the time like that.

That’s Shuttle Commander Scott Altman.

And if you look at other astronauts during missions, most (if not all) of them have something hanging around their neck.

It looks like a ring on a chain, so it’s probably his wedding ring. Many astronauts wear their wedding rings on chains around their neck. I think this is because of fluid redistribution in microgravity — since gravity isn’t pulling fluids down into your legs, the fluids move upwards, and your fingers tend to swell up, which would make rings suddenly not fit anymore, so you’d have to either put it away or put it on a chain. Sometimes the physical changes can be really dramatic — I seem to recall there was one astronaut (during the Shuttle-Mir program, IIRC) whose chest and spine expanded so much in space that there was a very real concern that he wouldn’t fit into his custom-made Sokol suit anymore.

Fair weather for them!

There was a fungus Among Us…

I watched that video twice, yesterday. First at Universe Today and later NASA TV showed it as well. It is so cool and really shows how life goes on on a spaceship!

There’s not much to erode, corrode or otherwise disintegrate it in space

Indeed. Oxidizing is quite hard out there

Was it a Mars mission on which this imperial stubbornness resulted in a dramatic stuff-up?
Or was it also the mensuration of the Hubble telescope mirror?
Or was it both?

When are you dudes going metric?

Unless its hit by something either accidentally or deliberately (& who’d want to hit the HST deliberately?) I’d think the Hubble Space Telescope would last eons. There’s not much to erode, corrode or otherwise disintegrate it in space – just a slow micrometeorite barrage, space junk, a few cosmic rays and eventually perhaps the decay of protons. I’ve read somewhere that the ‘Voyager’ and ‘Pioneer’ spacecraft may well be the last human artefacts around .. preserved longer in deep space than anything on our volatile, active planet.

I’d love them to keep Hubble around, working or not, for as long as possible – having it just burn up seems a tragic waste. Is there really any good reason why they can’t just boost the Hubble into a higher, longer lasting orbit where it can reside safely for a few hundred years or more? Or until we have the ability to pick up the HST and place it in a museum on Earth – or the Moon or Mars?

@ Pareidolius : Loved your post of May 20th, 2009 at 10:14 pm & I second it. Well said!

@ Michael L :
StevoR : I noticed that too. It appears to be a Volcano with a lava flow. It appears Atlantis was flying over a desert area, and if thaat was the case, it could be the Great Rift Valley in Africa, which has many volcanic features. But I could be wrong, and, it could, in fact be Mars, in which case NASA has some ’splainin’ to do!

Especially Mars with an ocean and rich cloudy atmosphere at that! Out of curiousity, why do you say volacano rather than crater? Not disagreeing just wondering. Does anyone know what part of our globe they were flying over?

I’ve been waiting all day to hear whether the ‘Atlantis’ has landed safely yet, after yesterday hearing they’d undocked from Hubble and then seeing this earlier this morning. I’m surprised they haven’t landed back on Earth already -what are they doing and waiting for? Just the right orbital position for the return trajectory or having to finish checklists or ..what?

Anyways, the point is having an additional source of debris orbiting the Earth seems silly. There’s quite a lot of junk and debris up there already. I suspect it’d be better to deorbit Hubble, when it finally does come to the end of its mission, rather then leave it up for purely sentimental reasons.

Having said that, if it could be parked in a suitable orbit where it’s (presumed) cloud of debris wouldn’t be too risky, it’d would be cool: And a potential target for (quite some time later! (e.g., decades from now)) a mission to study the effects of extremely long exposure to space.