Grasslands Observatory - Essays - Is the HST Still Doing Good Science?

The Controversy – Is HST worth it or what has it done lately?

The Hubble Space Telescope has been extraordinarily successful from a public relations and a scientific point of view, but is it worth the cost? And what has it done lately? Has it produced any good science in the last five years?

According to Gino (2004) “…by the time the HST is retired…the estimated total cost will be about 6 billion dollars. Spread out over its ten years of development and twenty years of operation, however, the cost is negligible…when put into the proper perspective, the HST would be a bargain at twice the price.” Nevertheless, what is a bargain to one person may seem like a financial disaster to another. Fortunately, HST’s productivity can be examined by objective scientific standards.

Publication of scientific results, especially in peer reviewed journals, has long been the established way for scientists to disseminate their work. Publication provides a forum for scientific ideas to be examined, confirmed, refuted, or modified. It is the way science works. Recently, the STScI developed a standard, quantitative methodology for estimating the scientific impact of HST (Meylan, 2004). This methodology was developed for two reasons: 1) to monitor Hubble’s operations to maximize its scientific output, and 2) to report objective measures of HST’s output to the public, the scientific community, Congress, and other funding agencies. This evaluation process examines the scientific publications resulting from HST observations, and it examines the citations for papers using HST data.

According to Meylan (2004), “there are two straightforward and relevant measures of the effectiveness of a telescope: the number of refereed papers based on data obtained by the telescope, and the citation count for those papers.” Examining HST using these criteria, shows it has been a most productive resource, and it continues to be one.

A personal review by this author of the monthly Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PSAP) from January 2003 through June 2004 showed there were 98 peer reviewed scientific articles in these issues. Eleven of these articles (11.2%) used data in part or entirely from HST observations (PSAP). The articles in the PSAP studied by this author include original scientific articles, review articles, instrumentation articles, and theoretical articles. Letters to the Editor and thesis review articles were not examined in this context.

BACK | NEXT