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Hubble's Advanced Camera Suspends Operations

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the burnout-revenge dept.

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."

10 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Hubble maintenance cancelled. by BWJones · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Gee, too bad the Bush administration cancelled all maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, dooming it to a slow death. Of course this whole science thing is overrated, right? In all honesty though, there simply is not enough money to take care of all of the costs given that the Bush administration wants to send men to Mars to the detriment of many, many science missions at NASA.

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    1. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by 54mc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It seems were killing all the easy ways to learn/discover our universe. I can see why the president wants to put men on Mars. It creates a buzz. No one talks about the pictures the Hubble just took, but a man standing on another planet, now that's news!

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    2. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by McBainLives · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't take me wrong- I'm just as disappointed about the potential end of the Hubble as anyone else. But you might want to take manned exploration of the local neighborhood a bit more seriously. It's more than just hype (which in retrospect, was too big a part of Kennedy's proposal in the 1960's). A serious, long-term plan for returning to the Moon, then moving on to Mars, will do us a lot more good than studying events hundreds or thousands of light-years away (think survival- it never hurts to have a backup plan).

      Besides- once we have a permanent presence on the Moon, we'll be able to set up telescopes much more powerful and easy to maintain than Hubble ever was.

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    3. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by UnrefinedLayman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Comments like this always blow my mind. It makes my brain throb like I just drank a milkshake. No one ever stops to hear themselves actually speak them and so apparently don't realize how mind-numbingly dumb they are (the words, not the people). I'm talking, of course, about this line:

      "Mars--the backup planet, the backup plan."

      Mars is one of the least hospitable and most difficult to reach places you could hope to find. Sure, Mars is probably the Club Med of all the other planets and satellites in the solar system but to believe truly that it is a sensible safe place to escape is nonsense. The least hospitable places on Earth are still way, way less lethal than Mars. That's right--lethal. Mars is not kind to even microbial life. We've come up with a lot of creative ways to peek around Mars looking for signs of it and the best we've found is the possibility that it was there but died a really, really long time ago. That's a nice big "No Trespassing" sign. Violators are killed on sight.

      Contrast with Earth, on whose worst day life still flourished. Believe it or not, there have been some pretty shitty days down here, like the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, the Permian-Triassic extinction (80+% extinction in a million years, not bad), our favorite the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, and our own Holocene extinction. When the shit goes down on Earth it is still far, far more habitable than any extra-terrestrial location. Animal life requires other life if it wants to survive. Starting from scratch on a lifeless planet is much harder (and strikes me as much less sensible) than sticking around where life has clung with tenacity for the last 3.5 billion years.

      The exception to this would be a planetary catastrophe that left no room for doubt that Earth would be less habitable than Mars is now--that would result in the total loss of liquid water, the burn up of all atmospheric oxygen, the loss of the Earth's magnetic field, the death and extinction of all life (from microbes on up), and the tipping point of sunlight being blocked from reaching the ground. Following this it would have to be more difficult to use resources available to eke out survival on Earth than it would be to use resources to reach another planet and start anew there.

      One point that's often brought up is that if we start now we can have people living sustainably on Mars who could carry on without the need for Earth, thus preserving our human legacy. I'm of the belief that when we are sufficiently technologically advanced to achieve such a result that a planet-wide catastrophe will be easily weathered right here using that same technology.

      It's like the guy saying string theory is eating up valuable resources that could be used elsewhere and everyone else saying it's too fun to give up. Dreams of colonizing Mars and living out our Ray Bradbury fantasies are too fun to give up, but don't bandy about the idea that it's anything remotely serious. At least string theory has some sensible math to back it up; there's little that's sensible about martian life as the human-kind "backup plan."

    4. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by (negative+video) · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Mars is one of the least hospitable and most difficult to reach places you could hope to find.
      Mars is the second most hospitable planet we know, after Earth. The only resource we don't know for sure that it has is uranium ore. The only really annoying thing is the giant long-duration dust storms.
      The least hospitable places on Earth are still way, way less lethal than Mars.
      Humans survive in Antarctica and the deep sea solely by means of a metric buttload of technology. Take it away and they die in seconds or minutes. Mars is different only in degree, not kind.
      Contrast with Earth, on whose worst day life still flourished. [big list of mass extinctions]
      If by "flourished" you mean "nearly all the big, elaborate organisms were snuffed out".
      We've come up with a lot of creative ways to peek around Mars looking for signs of it and the best we've found is the possibility that it was there but died a really, really long time ago. That's a nice big "No Trespassing" sign. Violators are killed on sight.
      No. We have done virtually no serious work on discovering Martian life (HPLC-tandem mass spec with chiral columns), and the conditions are within the known acceptable range for Earth-type microbes (sunlight, porous minerals, and temperature and pressure compatible with condensed-phase water).
      The exception to this would be a planetary catastrophe that left no room for doubt that Earth would be less habitable than Mars is now--that would result in the total loss of liquid water, the burn up of all atmospheric oxygen, the loss of the Earth's magnetic field, the death and extinction of all life (from microbes on up), and the tipping point of sunlight being blocked from reaching the ground.
      Don't be silly. You don't have to completely atomize Earth for the four horsemen to ride. A nice big asteroid coming in at 50 km/s and hitting a nice thick layer of limestone would likely make the human race go extinct. Being caught in a beam from a supernova or similar high-energy event would be very bad. Having some idiots set off a 20 stage thermonuclear bomb, just to see how far down the crust really goes, would give the human race a run for its money.
      ... there's little that's sensible about martian life as the human-kind "backup plan."
      Fuck sensible. It wasn't sensible for people to fill a grave every few yards on the deadly path between London and San Jose, but they did it anyway. Their equally unreasonable descendants will one day do it again, at enormous expense and personal risk.
    5. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by barawn · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Starting from scratch on a lifeless planet is much harder (and strikes me as much less sensible) than sticking around where life has clung with tenacity for the last 3.5 billion years.

      Life does not equal humans. There are plenty of ways that life could stick around and still eradicate all humans. Or all human civilization. Either or, because without civilization, we're just another species waiting to be extinguished. And human civilization is really fragile.

      While it may seem less sensible, starting from scratch on another planet has several advantages.

      1. You control the environment. Unless you go full-bore terraforming (and then, if you do, see below) you're living in a meticulously controlled self-contained habitat. Anything goes wrong, and it's likely a hell of a lot easier to fix than on Earth. This sounds bizarre, but think about it: killer virus gets loose on Earth, and you're in huge trouble. Killer virus gets loose on a habitat-controlled Mars... and everyone suits up and you irradiate the hell out of the place. Being in a lethal environment has its advantages. The only things that live are the ones you want to.
      2. More resources. We're unfortunately a very resource-hungry organism, and Earth's only got so much. While the standard argument is "we're nowhere near close to running out" - what, you want to wait until we are?
      3. And finally, but probably most importantly, we're a very lazy organism. You think we'll bother figuring out how this ecosytem works on our own? Please. We're terrible at learning things unless there's pressure on us. "Another country might get to the moon!" "They might get the bomb!" Man. Throw those things at us, and we're freaking geniuses. We're better off living in a sucky environment. So even if we terraform the planet, we'd still be better off - we made it, so we'll understand it better than Earth.


      The third point is really the big one. Just look at our pathetic attempts at ecological engineering - they're jokes. We usually end up constantly screwing things up. But I wouldn't discount the second one, either: Mars has a pretty big advantage in terms of depth of its gravity well.

      Plus, from a very practical standpoint, you could also think of it as the start of interplanetary zoning laws. It'd be real nice to offload really crappy industry to Mars, after all.
    6. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by grozzie2 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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.

      500 million a pop (last report, probably much higher today)to shoot off a shuttle, and even then, you guys rarely get around to actually doing it, to busy spending money on who knows what. Then you want to accuse the Russians of _wasting_ money? Dunno if you noticed, but, they actually do send folks back and forth to the ISS, and they even manage to do it on a schedule.

      Just an fyi, spending a few billion to fix a design problem, then finding out it wasn't fixed at all, that's a waste. Keeping a huge standing army of folks on staff to launch shuttles, and then not launching them, that's a waste. Spending a few bucks on Russian launches because domestic folks cant get the job done, that's not a waste, that's 'damage control'. While it may be possible the Russians dont spend that money as efficiently as you would like to see, hey, it's still a hell of a lot more efficient than tossing money into Nasa to get rides to the ISS, after all, the Russian expenditures actually result in rides to the ISS. Tossing money into Nasa in that respect, well, that's kinda like tossing it into a black hole these days, a total waste as it doesn't seem to result in rides to the ISS at all, just more excuses why it's not 'safe' to launch, and more reasons for delays.

  2. Only if... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    ...a space telescope could also be able to be pointed downwards towards Earth and had powerful enough optics to be able to count the hairs in an Arab's beard, you could be damned sure that US govt money to fund it would flow like Budweiser at a biker's party.

  3. Place your bets by Joebert · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    That's fancy talk for "Placing bets on what's going to break next".
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    1. Re:Place your bets by TubeSteak · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's fancy talk for "Placing bets on what's going to break next if they do something stupid".

      Fixed that for you.

      In a sense, they are placing bets, but whatever course(s) of action has the highest probability of causing failures... they aren't gonna do it.

      After all, the engineers have nothing to lose if they spend a month trouble shooting every possible failure scenario.

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