Astronomer Depression Skyrocketing Over Loss of Hubble Camera. Are Mass Suicides Inevitable?

We need to let go of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It’s dying, is past it’s prime and we may as well start preparing ourselves for it’s eventual death. The death of the HST is far from a bad thing though, we have much better things on the horizon, more exciting discoveries await!

But people aren’t focusing on that, there have been too many amazing pictures to come from that telescope and now everyone is attached, a little too attached. I think everyone’s a little too emotional about the HST.

A while back, people got really upset when then NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe decided that NASA wasn’t going to repair the Hubble, they were just going to let it die so they could focus on the next generation of space telescopes. Seemed perfectly reasonable to me, the HST is old and we could do much better with the newer detectors and optical advances that have been developed since the 1980’s when the HST was designed. We also desperately need a telescope that doesn’t depend on the space shuttle for every little thing.

O’Keefe took an amazing amount of grief over that decision and was eventually forced out of the job, in part, over that whole issue. Now, the current NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, has made the HST repair a priority. It’s going to happen in 2008. Yay. Warm fuzzies all around.

Of course, i can afford to be pragmatic about this because my career isn’t intimately tied to it.

Now it’s the failure of the Advanced Camera for Surveys that’s getting astronomers and the public all bunched up, panty-wise. The moans of despair are overwhelming, even though there is a better camera ready to take it’s place and do a better job, a camera imaginatively named the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). That’s right, it’s a BETTER camera, it has a much larger wavelength sensitivity than the ACS did, and I believe it is a big step up. Better science will come from this new camera.

But, people have become very emotional about anything related to the Hubble Space Telescope. I mean, I understand a lot of it, I really do. I am one of Hubble’s biggest fans. But here is what I just read from New Scientist website in this article:

“There’s been a lot of really depressed astronomers [since ACS failed],” says John Blakeslee, an astrophysicist at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, US. “If at all possible, it would be wonderful to have that capability back.”

Now, I know I’m taking this quote a little too far and a bit out of context, and that my title for this post is a little over the top, but I use it to bring up some issues that I’ve been meaning to discuss for some time now. Namely that people need to let the Hubble Space Telescope go.

Of all the things I read so far from bloggers, I like AstroProf’s balanced view the best. The Bad Astronomer did a great job too. You’re not going to get balanced from me today.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the HST has a glorious number of achievements under its belt. I have commented and written numerous times that that camera has given us the most important image ever taken: The Hubble Deep Field. That image so inspired me, that I made a video about it.

But lets get real, NASA has limited money in it’s pockets, and there are much better space telescopes in our future. I think it’s time we get a grip on ourselves about the HST and let it go. We can revere it sure, even mourn it’s passing, but let it die already. The HST was our first attempt at putting an optical telescope in orbit, and it was a resounding success (after an initial embarrassment), but we can do so much better, and we will.

Lest we forget:

The Hubble Space Telescope Was a Joke When It Was FIrst Launched

Technorati Tags: hubble space telescope, space pictures, telescopes

I remember when it was discovered that the primary mirror on the HST had the most basic of optical defects: spherical aberration (and still does to this day) . The contractor of the primary mirror, Perkin Elmer, didn’t test the mirror properly and they launched the Hubble with a crappy primary mirror. This meant the Hubble couldn’t even focus, my $300.00 Edmund Astroscan could produce better images than the HST. Rocket science, it seemed wasn’t, well…., rocket science.

So millions of dollars later, we installed a pair of glasses on it, now the images were as they should have been. People still made fun of that telescope for years after that.

Then Came the Hubble Deep Field
In my opinion, this is the most important image ever taken in the history of humanity. If you take the time to understand the context under which this picture was taken, it show us at a glance just how mind-numbingly large our universe is. Pictures like the Hubble Deep Field really changed the way people looked at that telescope.

Since it’s initial repair, an almost constant stream of pictures were taken that were extraordinarily beautiful, thought-provoking and paradigm-shifting. We can thank the Advanced Camera for Surveys for almost all of them, it provided us with views of the cosmos that opened our minds and forced us to think about our place in it.

I think it’s images like the Ultra Deep Field that made us really appreciate the importance of having a telescope in orbit, we realized that it gave us perspective by providing the deepest views into our universe than we have ever before seen. We could look back in time and with unprecedented detail at the marvels and beauty that lay in wait for us out there.

The Future of Astronomical Discovery is in the Infrared

The Advanced Camera for Surveys is an imager that works in optical wavelengths only and while it operates very efficiently at collecting photons in those wavelengths, that is an extremely narrow view of the universe. We have been imaging in these wavelengths since the invention of the telescope. Here is a quote from the New Scientist article:

“WFC3 is a very powerful instrument, with capabilities ACS doesn’t have,” including very sensitive response in the infrared, acknowledges Garth Illingworth, deputy principal investigator for ACS and an astronomer at California’s Lick Observatory.

“But what we were looking forward to was operating it in parallel with the advanced camera,” he told New Scientist. The plan was for the two cameras to take turns observing the sky at different wavelengths, with ACS observing in the visible while WFC3 observed in the infrared.

Yes, this would be nice, but it’s now it’s become an impossibility. I don’t despair though, because the new camera that will be installed in 2008 will provide some outstanding science, and it will do it in a part of the spectrum that is truly interesting, the infrared.

The infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum is loosely defined as the wavelengths from about 1 micron (near visible red) out to 70 microns and beyond depending on what kind of scientist you’re talking to. We’ve only just developed imagers, CCD’s, capable of providing pictures at these wavelength; they’ve only been around for about a decade or so. This new capability allows views of the universe we’ve never before seen and give us images like this:

Photo Credit: Spitzer Science Center

Further, the camera that will replace the ACS, while less efficient at visible wavelengths, will have a much wider wavelength range; we’re just sacrificing some efficiency for more wavelength. That’s a common compromise made all the time when using scientific imagers, and is one, that to me anyway, is a no-brainer. Take a look at this graph of the efficiency of the cameras on board the HST plotted against wavelength.

Illustration Credit: STSci

Look at how much more coverage the WFC3 is going to provide. It will be able to collect photons all the way out to about 1.5 to maybe 1.8 microns. The old ACS (the topmost green arc) ends at less than 1 micron. The average efficiency of the WFC3 is about 3-4 times less at the visible wavelengths than the ACS was, but that isn’t the end of the world, you still can still take lots of images with it. The exciting thing, however, is the infrared images this new camera makes possible.

Imagine an Ultra Deep Field at 1.5 microns! What’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!

Conclusion

Look, I’m sad the ACS camera went dead just as much as the next guy, and I’m sure many careers hang in the balance now that it’s dead and that’s a real scary proposition for many, many astronomers. But the writing has been on the wall for the HST for years now, it is operating past its operational design time anyway. This is all gravy, folks.

But do not despair! There are great things on the horizon, and the HST is far from dead. It will gain a new lease on life as well as an extremely exciting new camera in 2008 which will continue to wow us for many more years.

I’m the most excited for the James Webb Telescope. I believe that telescope will surpass Hubble in humbling and amazing us. It will give us such views of the cosmos that we will sit in awe of them.

It’s way too early for astronomers to impale themselves on their telescopes just yet.