STScI Annual Report 2002: A Living Mission

We at the Space Telescope Science Institute are pleased to bring you the
good news of Hubble’s continued health and success. We are privileged to
promote the science flowing from the community’s use of NASA’s most
productive and most important scientific mission. We encourage you to
recognize Hubble as a historic telescope and as a living mission, sustained
on the cutting edge of science by new instrument development and shuttle
servicing performed by modern explorers.
We sometimes hear that Hubble is an old facility, but in many
ways it is like that 19th century mansion: the Optical Telescope
Assembly is still superb, the pointing control system is still the
most accurate ever built, and the computer and power systems
have been upgraded to modern standards. And—again, most
importantly—Hubble’s scientific capabilities are state-ofthe-art
and second-to-none because of new instruments.
We have not reached the end of Hubble’s potential, although we
may have reached the end of the public’s good will in supporting
future upgrades. The Institute recently looked at ideas for new
Hubble instruments and found two that would easily enhance
performance by further factors of ten or more: an optical camera
with a much wider field of view and a coronagraph for studying
faint sources next to bright objects like planets around nearby
stars. These ideas cannot exhaust the possibilities. Such new
instruments would spur scientific advances at the end of this
decade like those of ACS and the revived NICMOS today. They
would create immediate opportunities for discovery and scientific
inquiry that are not otherwise achievable in this decade, for they
demand the superb Hubble optical telescope, support systems,
and operational infrastructure, which are not likely to be recreated
for many years after Hubble is turned off.
In the recently released study of the scientific impact of NASA’s
missions, Greg Davidson writes, “Large astronomical observatories
continue to have very high scientific productivity—more than
half of the science and technology return for NASA.” According
to Davidson, “An analysis of 1990-1999 data by this metric
(performed in January 2000) indicated that [the NASA Office of
Space Science’s] large missions had twice the science productivity
per dollar as smaller missions, and, if anything, the past three
years have seen an even higher contribution from large observatories.
With the installation of ACS in 2002 (along with restoration
of NICMOS and continued operation of STIS), Hubble has
essentially achieved the full level of instrumentation capability
anticipated when the lifecycle servicing program was put
into place just before launch in 1990, and should probably be
performing at its peak.”
STScI AR 02 | A Living Mission
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