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Hubble's Advanced Camera Suspends Operations
helio writes "The Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) went offline on June 19, 2006. The cause is yet undetermined, although engineers suspect that the culprit may be a bad transistor in the ACS's electronic control board or possibly a memory corruption event due to energetic particle bombardment. Since a backup electronic controller is available for service, this incident is not very likely to lead to the end of the Hubble's Advanced Camera in any event. But, before any attempt to reactivate the camera, engineers are cautiously evaluating and isolating the probable cause of this incident in order to avoid any further incident."
Here is another link that may be worthy of checking:
Space.com article.
And the original statement from Space Telescope Science Institute (this was edited out by the editor...not that I mind being edited, btw):
STScI Anomaly Report
I work for NASA on the manned programs.
Officially, Sean O'Keefe (the former NASA admistrator) dropped the last Hubble servicing mission from the Space Shuttle manifest because of the risk involved (Hubble was the only non-ISS mission left, leaving no option to fix the orbiter with the help of ISS assets or possibly "holing up" in the ISS while a rescue mission was processed). I'm really oversimplifying it, but essentially that's the reason.
Of course, I'm fairly certain Sean O'Keefe was the only individual within NASA that thought this was too great of a risk. That includes the astronauts who would actually strap themselves to the orbiter stack. Everyone at NASA loves Hubble. O'Keefe may have been playing politics to get Congress to "order" the mission, thus relieving NASA of the risk decision.
O'Keefe is gone now, however, and the new administrator (Mike Griffin) has been more or less been in favor of servicing Hubble again.
Anyways, while the flight isn't officially on the books it's more or less common knowledge around here there is going to be a servicing mission in 2008 or so. Long lead work is being done on the flight. As long as something drastic doesn't happen to the shuttle program that causes it to shut down, that mission is going to be flown. Hubble is NASA's crown jewel.
Worst...sig...ever!
...but the hubble works much better in the infrared from what I understand....
No, no, no!
[I'm banging my head on the desk right now, because of you...]
The Hubble Space Telescope, by design is a telescope designed to observe the Universe in ultra-violet (UV) waveband. Its mirror gerates the finest point image at 2800Angstrom, and the image rapidly degrades at a longer wavelength (esp. IR). It's Daniel Goldin and his stupid minions who successfully sold the idea that the HST would be a great IR telescope (to detect planets, which were the hot topic to sell to the congress for funding).
You can do most of IR observations from the ground. Even the imaging quality ain't too bad from the ground, either. The best part of doing IR in space is the gain in sensitivity (the atmosphere isn't exactly dark in IR; also it absorbs some water molecule wavebands). But then, there is Spitzer telescope for IR space astronomy today. You don't need the Hubble to do that.
On the other hand, you can't do UV astronomy from the ground. The air is opaque to UV light.
Hubble servicing project (tentatively STS-125) scheduled for 2008, as per Wikipedia.
That reference came from a Washington Post article in April, 2005. Since that time, NASA has had their budget cut for almost all science missions that have nothing to do with putting man on Mars.
But don't let that get in the way of your ignorant, uninformed, nonsensical political rant.
There was nothing in my post that was not factually based. The reality is that given the budget management of the nation, there is simply not enough money to do basic science missions if we send people to Mars.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
NASA has been reallocating a lot of funding from science and aeronautics to "exploration". The official goal is a manned moon landing (by 2018).
That being said, the Hubble servicing mission is still in the cards and long lead work is being performed to support it. It's almost certain it will be flown. In fact, the NASA web page for servicing mission 4 was updated just a little over a week ago.
Worst...sig...ever!
I believe that would be dust.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
But don't let that get in the way of your ignorant, uninformed, nonsensical political rant.
Budget cuts and safety concerns were the reasons given for cancellation of the 2006 repair mission, and any future such missions are currently speculative possibilities "under consideration." http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/future/ has more on this, as does http://hubble.nasa.gov/.
But don't let actual facts get in the way of your ignorant, uninformed and nonsensical attacking of someone else for actually knowing them.
Well, for what it is worth you can consider me a friend from JSC. While the mission isn't "officially" on, it's considered to be almost certain around here. I'm not sure about the White House, but congressional pressure to fly this mission is considerable.
Ironically enough, the Constellation program manager (Jeff Hanley) cut his teeth on Hubble as a Payloads officer in Mission Control. When the original SM4 mission was cancelled, he posted this
to sci.astro.hubble.
Worst...sig...ever!
O'Keefe was NOT a scientist, but a business-track administrator, and as such didn't have an intimate understanding of the import of science as a full-blooded scientist does. In other words, he looked at the Hubble telescope as a business project, not as a scientific instrument. Luckily Griffin is completely opposite, he was a scientist and worked his way from science through science management, so has an understanding of both fields pretty well.
Additionally, Columbia was lost on O'Keefe's watch, so he's overcompensating by being excessively cautious for future flights. Unfortunately to the point of compromising scientific fulfillment.
I worked on the upgrades for the HST (i.e. SM4 - Service Mission Four). They were cancelled in favor of spending more $$$ on STS (Shuttle) and mostly ISS( Station). The pressure was on to finish ISS which really meant the money was going to the Russians who promptly wasted 90% of it.
IIRC NASA actually budgeted all three but only two got funds. Then when funding was restored for SM4 a few years later, we had all the problems with STS which all of a sudden meant going to Hubble was "unsafe". We knew the HST was slowly dying and that we only had 2 out of 4 gyros (not same problem as this article) that were good and one more that was "flaky". If we lost one of the good gyros we could rework the software to account for the flakiness of the 3rd gyro, but lose two and HST shuts down as you no longer have attitude control to point the instruments. The bad thing was all of these gyros came from the same batch from the same company. An earlier service mission had replaced two bad ones that failed earlier but the new ones themselves are now failing. Last caclulations I recall the HST might make it to sometime in 2009 or early 2010 before it fails, but that was under "nominal" conditions.
It was NOT GWB's fault, the decisons were made by Congress not wanting to fund NASA to the level where they could do all three, HST, STS, and ISS. Remember ALL spending Bills MUST orginate in the House of Representatives, then be approved by both houses of Congress and the President. It also doesn't help that NASA's budget gets lumped into bills that fund other things like HUD and Veterans so it often gets short shafted as we can't spend LESS money on Social project or Veteran's benefits so we can so space.
Ground (Earth) based telescopes are almost (if not better) than Hubble in certain wavelengths due to fairly recent technologies. The key ones being Adaptive Optics and Interferometry, which have allowed for astronomers to compensate/eradicate most of the problems associated with the atmosphere. 10 years ago these technologies were mostly theory, and 20 years ago there was no-one that would take the ideas seriously. We really have come a long way since Hubble was on the dtrawing board, and I don't think we need space based telescopes for most areas of astronomy. Of course there are a few wavebands that we cannot observe properly on Earth, but it's not the case that space telescopes are superior. In fact, the next generation telescopes (ALMA, OWL, ELT etc) will most likely surpass the JWST in the frequencies they can observe.
Astronomers generally refer to space telescopes as complementary to ground telescopes. But we won't be building telescopes like ALMA, OWL etc on the Moon because of the difficulty in assembling them on Earth. They need a lot of space and materials (both to house and to construct, which is a problem for the limited space on rockets) and optical telescopes need their mirrors cleaning. I just don't see us building large telescopes on the Moon when we can get almost the same results from having space telescopes and ground based ones that complement each other.
The only way I see us building Lunar telescopes is if we find a cheap way to launch the building blocks. If we manage this though, we would open up a lot more possibilities, such as building the telescope on Mars. The South Pole would be a good place as it has: free water (as in not tied up in rocks like the Moon)/rocket fuel (with a decent power source) and has a lot more gravity than the Moon (which would be a lot better for long stays). Most people would say we shouldn't go so far due to the long trips for astronauts, but the ISS currently has around 6 months stays for crews with no problem.
That's why I have this on my personalized Google. Granted they're not all Hubble images, but there's certainly a significant number of photos for your perusal.
Well, Venus is closer, warmer and with a substantial atmosphere.
If by "warmer" you mean "melts lead", yeah, it's warmer. Space probes can't survive on Venus. People definitely can't.
But Venus's biggest problem is related: it doesn't rotate nearly fast enough.
You want an ideal planet? Smack Mars into Venus. Unsurprisingly, that's how Earth started out.
but a bonus point is that as an inner planet
That's more of a downside: I don't think liquid water can survive on Venus already for any long period of time due to the solar insolation. The Sun's so bright from Venus that it'll just rip water in the atmosphere apart.
It's definitely possible to imagine a stable, terraformed Mars. It'll hold an Earth atmosphere for long enough for it to matter, and it's close enough to the Sun that water would even be liquid for a portion of the year.
Venus, I'm not so sure. The rotation rate's a killer, for one, and I think the solar insolation might be a death knell as well. Maybe you could build a giant solar shade, though, but you could always do the reverse on Mars to heat it up as well.