A senior space engineer wants NASA to preserve the historic spacecraft in orbit and examine astronaut droppings on the Moon.
On May 18, 2009, 570km above planet Earth, astronaut John Grunsfeld became the last human to touch the Hubble Space Telescope. Before entering the Space Shuttle Atlantis’ airtight door at the end of a grueling final repair mission, he remembered a quote from the science fiction legend, Arthur C. Clarke.
“The only way to find the limits of the possible, is to go beyond them, to the impossible,” he said over the intercom to the VIPs gathered at the mission control center.
“On this mission, we’ve tried several things that many people say are impossible… We wish Hubble the best.”
The crew released the Hubble telescope into orbit and, as Atlantis drifted away, the shimmering cylinder slowly disappeared into the void.
Now that the Space Shuttle program has been discontinued, there is no way to carry out any more Hubble repair missions. If the situation is favorable, the space telescope will remain operational for several more years, continuing to reveal the majesty of the Universe. But in the next decade, the satellite components will eventually break down over time and their orbits decay.
As one of the most important scientific achievements in history, Hubble was destined to burn up as it entered Earth’s atmosphere in the early 2030s. His fate will be the same as for many other historical space objects – from the first satellite and Laika the space dog, to Skylab and the Mir space station.
But there may be other “impossible” options.
“[It] was a shame for an object so venerated,” said Stuart Eves, head of the Space Information Exchange – the UK government and industry forum for space security and infrastructure – who is a satellite technician and space debris expert.
“Instead, in the same way we keep historic ships, airplanes, cars, and trains in museums,” he says, “we need to continue to care for Hubble and look after it for posterity.”
Rather than bringing it back to Earth – an expensive and challenging mission (though the Space Shuttle was successfully attempted in 1984 with the help of two communications satellites) – Eves called on the US government to keep the Hubble telescope in space.
Prior to Hubble’s final repair mission, Nasa investigated the possibility of using robots to come and repair the satellite instead of astronauts. Eves wanted the same technology adapted to keep the telescope in orbit.
“A satellite can catch the telescope, shift it in the right direction and push it into a higher orbit, so it hangs there for a while,” he said. “Then your problem – like all museum curators – is to keep this valuable asset from being eroded over time, for example by radiation and space debris.”
Eves’s proposed solution is to launch a small satellite – such as a shoebox-sized cubesat satellite – into the same orbit as Hubble, to act as a virtual guardian or curator.
“You fly a small robot camera around an object and make the video visible to museum visitors with, for example, a VR headset,” he said. “At least we have a documentary on Hubble.”
The same cubesat technology can also be used to monitor iconic space artifacts such as Telstar, the first TV communications satellite – launched in 1962 and still in elliptical orbit between 1000 and 5,600km above the planet – or Vanguard-1, the oldest space object in orbit. .
“CubeSat has been considered for monitoring the International Space Station,” said Eves.
“High-resolution cameras can fly around the station to survey its condition and whether there is any damage to the exterior that you may need to know.”
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