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Farewell To Eyes Above And Below
LMCBoy writes "SpaceRef is reporting that the STIS Instrument on board HST has failed. The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph was HST's only spectrometer, and was responsible for several important discoveries, including the first detection of an exoplanet's atmosphere.
The loss is believed to have been caused by a failure in the instrument's main electronics box, which led to a rapid increase in the input current of about 1 ampere, which caused the instrument to enter a "suspend" state. It is believed that this failure is not recoverable."
No_Weak_Heart writes "Perhaps the world's most renowned submersible, Alvin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is slated for retirement. Alvin has helped scientists explore deep sea, find a lost Hydrogen bomb(oops!) and discover more than 300 new animal species, will be replaced by a newer version in 2008. Also available this audio clip from NPR." (Here's a glance at Alvin's replacement.) Update: 08/07 17:29 GMT by T : Note: "HST"="Hubble Space Telescope." Thanks to Chris Johansen for pointing out the overloaded acryonym.
Don't forget that Alvin was also responsible for helping Dr. Robert Ballard to find the wreck of the Titanic.
Note to submitter. While 99% of us may know what HST stands for, it is extremely poor taste (and frankly just plain lazy) not to spell it out. Some comment to Timothy, who could have elaborated before posting the story. Not eveyone may know what HST stands for.
The spectrograph is what failed; the optics are fine and dandy.
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We're still going to get nice pretty pictures out of Hubble, just no UV/wavelength pictures
Hubble's hobbled, but still alive and kicking.
No, the largest portion of the US FED budget is transfer payments. Defense and Interest on the debt are in 2nd and 3rd.
Linkage
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
um. no. sorry. And yes, HST does check quite often with its shutter closed (after each exposure, probably) to account for temperature changes across the CCD.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I believe there are already some possible Hubble replacements. The new telescope in Arizona is planned to produce visual images 10 times sharper than Hubble (according to cnn.com) . Also, many scientists studying deep space are using X-rays, which has the Chandra X-ray observatory
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
The X-33 was canceled because they couldn't keep the composite fuel tanks from leaking. They had to change the design to aluminum tanks, which lowered the payload because they weigh more. When NASA evaluated the new design they said no thanks.
Briefly, there's ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys), which does both optical and UV imaging; WFPC2 (Wide Field Planetary Camera 2), the older UV/optical imager; and NICMOS, which does near-infrared imaging. Both ACS and NICMOS also have spectroscopy modes, though they don't make up for what STIS does, or did.
-- Keysh (Peter Erwin)
The romance of the ocean isn't dead. If anything, it's just starting. In someways it was a little unfair to put these two articles together, since the implication for Alvin was all wrong. It's not being decommissioned, they have just announced plans to replace it.
Woods hole, the makers of Alvin, are buliding a new a sub that can go about 5,000ft deeper, which means that crews can access 99% of the ocean floor as opposed to ~68% they have accessable with Alvin. They are also building a ROV that descend the full length of the Marinara trench. Alvin still works great, but is just too old and cramped, and doesn't compare to the modern research subs operating out of Europe and Japan, which puts American researchers at a disadvantage. In fact, the operators of Alvin have not decided whether or not to decomission it. They might still decide to continue to run it after 2008 in the "shallow" waters that it accesses today in conjunction with the new submarine.
Plus, it's going to be bigger and roomier, one of the researchers compared it to "buying a new cadillac when you have a chevy in the garage."
Sounds like more of a new dawn than the death of oceanography to me. Of course, the Slashdot headline was mis-leading, but that's why we love it ;)
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"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
After all, Skylab was a pioneering space "device" (for lack of a better term) and we let that fall back down to Earth.
We didn't "let" Skylab fall back to Earth, unless you consider orbital decay about 18 months early and a delayed space shuttle that was to push it back up letting.