The Official Bell Tolls: With New NASA Budget, The Hubble Is Dead, page 1

The "crats" at NASA are getting thier wish, the bulk of the money being budgeted for the Hubble is earmarked for a robot to make sure it is steered into the ocean What a waste

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- With the moon on its horizon, NASA sees a slight increase in the budget proposed by President Bush on Monday, but it's not enough to save the Hubble Space Telescope.

Only $93 million in the space agency's $16.45 billion budget would go toward Hubble's survival: $75 million to develop a kamikaze robot that would steer the orbiting observatory into the ocean at the end of its lifetime, and $18 million to try to eke out as much scientific observing time as possible from the telescope through clever remote controlling.
www.cnn.com...

Originally posted by 954speeder
I'm pretty sure sometime in the near future, there will be better optics and technology to make an advance space telescope that will do a better job. Hubble's has more than outlived its usefullness.

So maybe we have to scrap pretty much every land-based telescope because their optics are older than ten years... some of them are ~100 years old!

Well working optics doesn't get old, it's detectors and instruments which get old and those are replaceable. (which won't be case with Webb)


At least we know where the fat goes... ~18 billion increase in 2006 budget compared to 2005.
Bush Delivers $419.3 Billion DoD Budget to Congress

What a disappointment, I really loved those pictures.
According to the Financial Times Hubble isn’t the only project being affected by the new budget:

"The new budget suggests the Moon-to-Mars missions may also have been placed on the backburner.

The agency has effectively cancelled the Jupiter Icy Moons probe, which was to be the first long-range test of a nuclear-powered craft.
Spaceships powered by solar energy - which becomes weaker far from the Sun - are considered unusable
for manned missions well beyond Earth. Nasa says it will test its nuclear power technology with a cheaper mission.

Nasa is also reducing funding to develop a new vehicle to send astronauts to the moon."

Originally posted by thematrix
I think this decision is made with the knowledge that ESA is launching 2 brand new telescopes in the next 2 years, the cost of leasing time on these is most likely much less then the cost of repairing, upgrading and replacing hubble.

None of them will be Hubble like "general purpose" telescope. (from near-IR to UV)
www.esa.int...


First remember that with longer radiation's wavelength you have to have bigger mirror to keep "resolution" even at same level. (have you ever wondered why radio astronomy uses thousand kilometers long interferometers)
And again, Webb won't be optical (visible light) telescope so it can't really replace Hubble.

Also there's other very big problem in IR telescopes... basically they detect heat radiation so in order to see anything mirrors and detectors (and telescope's tube) have to be kept at very low temperature or otherwise heat radiation from them swamps radiation from target.
To achieve this IR telescopes generally use liquid Helium to cool them... and after they run out of coolant they're useless.
They could be used to optical observations after running out of coolant by adding approriate detectors, but accurasy of mirror made for IR observations isn't enough for visible light, (because of shorter wavelength of visible light) or it would have to be made with accurasy of mirrors used in optical telescopes.



en.wikipedia.org...
ISO (Infrared Space Observatory)

www.astro.queensu.ca...

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