Saving Hubble: We knew Not What We Asked!
Those of you who knew the first life of Alcaide’s Cafe know we were ardent fans of the Hubble. We used its awesome photos frequently. We praised it almost every Sunday in a feature titled “Sunday’s Praise”. We lobbied for this last space shuttle mission (scheduled to launch May 11th) and featured a prominent button linking to the “Save the Hubble” group and petition on our sidebar.
I am glad it is going, but I can understand why NASA was originally so reluctant, and why they’ve spent a couple of years training for the mission. Just look at this picture (I’ll improve it after I do some studying up - this is my first image in a post in this incarnation of the Cafe, and WordPress):
Replacing this mess of stuff is just one of five back-to-back similar projects teams of astronauts will “spacewalk” to perform. The others are to install six new stabilizing gyroscopes, six new nickel-hydrogen battery packs, the new data computer and two new instruments, the $126 million Wide Field Camera 3 and the $81 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Can you imagine doing that housed in the bulky spacesuits, floating in space, having to make sure not even a tiny screw escape to get into some trouble. It would be a major challenge in a good cleanroom here on earth with days, not hours, to get each done!
I almost feel I should apologize. Instead, I think I’ll salute them (even if they end up failing!) and praise their courage and willingness to serve us all.
