Latest Gear Live Videos
NASA fighting to keep James Webb telescope alive
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Science,
NASA's James Webb telescope, the successor to the Hubble, is on the chopping block. With the U.S. Congress arguing over fiscal matters, one of the things that may get cut is NASA's budget, with the expensive James Webb telescope potentially getting the ax. If that happens, a generation of scientific discoveries about the nature of the universe may need to be put on hold.
Right now the future of the Webb telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, is uncertain. Congress is looking to cut costs, and NASA's budget could be cut by as much as $1.6 billion (or about nine percent of its overall budget). Such a big cut would certainly be the death knell for the Webb telescope, which has so far cost $3 billion but whose final price is expected to hit the $6.8-billion mark.
"The cost overruns are driven by a couple things," says Rick Howard, the program director of the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA. "We've had ten or so technologies that needed to work in order to have this kind of telescope—mirrors actuators, the sunshade. We've made great progress, but it's taken longer and it's been harder than we thought. We've had to invent new adhesives for carbon fiber because what we thought was the right chemical equation didn't work at all. Another source was inadequate early funding of reserves."
Click to continue reading NASA fighting to keep James Webb telescope alive
Advertisement
Astronauts Repair Hubble Telescope
Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Science, Transportation,
While we were all leading our mundane lives the past week, astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel spent 7 hours installing a new camera on the Hubble Telescope. This cam replaces one that was built in the 90s and is sensitive to infrared and ultraviolet light as well as the human eye’s wavelengths. As we have previously mentioned, this is NASA’s final trek that over an eleven day period includes replacing a key computer.
Read More 
| Reuters
Hubble Gets New Facelift in Part by Hubble Huggers
Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Science, Transportation,
NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope is about to receive its final upgrade, one that they hope means another 5 years of use. Atlantis and a crew of seven astronauts took off today, but it almost didn’t happen. Hubble Huggers such as Fernando Ribeiro, who founded the site SaveTheHubble, were undoubtedly partially responsible. He collected about 5,500 signatures on a petition to reverse a decision by NASA to postpone a Hubble repair mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster. NASA credits the support as part of the reason it changed its mind.
Read More | Space
Hubble Tracks Black Holes on the Internet
Posted by Sheila Franklin Categories: Internet, Science, Software,
According to Ethan Katz-Bassett, a University of Washington grad student, there are black holes on the Internet. Funded by the National Science Foundations, he and his advisor Arvind Krishnamurthy designed a program to find them. They make sure that the problem is not just a temporary glitch on a site and mark them on a global map. The pair is hoping that service providers will use Hubble, named after the Space telescope that charts black holes, to track down their own issues. The findings will be presented at the Usenix Symposium being held next week in San Francisco.
Read More | MSNBC
Advertisement
© Gear Live Inc. {year} – User-posted content, unless source is quoted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License. Gear Live graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, videos, articles, blogs, forums, scripts and other service names are the trademarks of Gear Live Inc.