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.