Space Research on a budget

Every so often ideas percolate up to my mind - that might actually be something useful.

Consider a moment the discoveries brought by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Marvels unknown before its existence have been brought to the scope of human knowledge.

The current HST is living on borrowed time. Soon a gyroscope will fail and it will no longer be usable.

But the designs for the telescope still exist. The infrastructure to build another HST exist.

You might think - for a moment - so what? After all there are new Earth-based telescopes that are now beginning to rival the HST's resolution. Do we really need to replace it?

The answer to that question is a clear no. It would cost a lot of money and deliver no more than the most sophisticated Earth-based telescopes.

But there is a reason why we could and should biuld another HST.

Using the knowledge gained in Deep Space 1 of the ionic drive and automatic navigation and the technology of HST - we can and should build an HST capable of leaving the solar system at as high a speed as we can get it to move.

It may be that Earth-based telescopes are approaching the HST is magnification, but a HST that is located off the plane of our Solar System and far away from the sun would be far more powerful than any near-term Earth-based telescope could hope to achieve.

The sun is like a giant flashlight drowning out the rest of the universe that we can see from Earth and even Earth orbit.

But if we were to launch a new HST powered by an economical ion drive after a significant boost from orbit with chemical rockets - the sun is far dimmer even just outside the orbit of Neptune and Pluto.

Such a telescope on its way out of the solar system could be turned towards Earth to map the Near Earth Objects.

I think it would only require minor modifications to the HST design to make something like this work.

Then, the best thing would be to have two new HSTs. Exiting our solar system from different directions. They would be useful as two telescopes, of course, but combined together they would create a single telescope with incredible clarity of pictures.

Now, that is something to hope for to be done in the future.

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