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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."

21 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 amabbi · · Score: 5, Funny
      Gee, too bad the Bush administration cancelled all maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, dooming it to a slow death.

      Hubble servicing project (tentatively STS-125) scheduled for 2008, as per Wikipedia.

      But don't let that get in the way of your ignorant, uninformed, nonsensical political rant.

    3. 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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    4. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by BWJones · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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    5. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by cyclone96 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    6. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think you're absolutely right, about the value of manned space exploration, but I also think that right now NASA is dithering; they're not spending enough time and money on either the things that already work (e.g., Hubble) or on things that will only work if we put a ton of effort into them (e.g., a human return to the Moon, and then on to Mars.) Without a massive increase in their budget -- which I'd love to see, but I'm not holding my breath -- the current situation boils down to "jack of all trades, master of none."

      And yes, I think the White House is largely responsible for this situation. When Bush first started talking big about manned space flight, I honestly thought that this was the one thing he might do to turn his administration from an unqualified disaster into a major success; long after stupidities like the Iraq war have faded into history, a thriving human presence in space would be a great legacy. But nope, it was just election-year hype. As usual.

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    7. 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."

    8. 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.
    9. Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled. by twiddlingbits · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    10. 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.
  2. More links by helioquake · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  3. Re:Funding by Firethorn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hubble always had a limited life span, and with the loss of two shuttles, we have to look at prioritizing, especially with the requirement for the astronaughts to be able to evacutate to the ISS if the shuttle is unable to land.

    Personally, I'd be working more towards launching a replacement for the Hubble. Ground based telescopes have caught up in many ways with adaptive lense technologies, but the hubble works much better in the infrared from what I understand. Design the replacement more towards making up the shortfalls of ground based telescopes.

    Given the cost of a dedicated shuttle maintenance mission, it might even be cheaper to just launch new ones, especially if you make a series of them, allowing you to spread R&D costs between multiple sats.

    --
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  4. Hmmmm.. by electronmaster · · Score: 3, Funny

    Shoulda bought the warranty. I'm a camera salesman, I know.

  5. Re:Funding by cyclone96 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  6. Re:Funding by helioquake · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  7. Of course by Itninja · · Score: 5, Funny

    "At this point, the ACS is in a safe configuration, and further analysis is ongoing,"

    Your computer is currently running in safe mode. Some functions may be unavailable.
    Looks like it's time to do a wipe and reinstall the Hubble. It's probably just spyware anyway...

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  8. 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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  9. Re:energetic? by 0racle · · Score: 4, Informative

    I believe that would be dust.

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  10. Hubble Origins Probe by bhima · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This would be nearly a non-issue if the powers that be had gotten off their asses and funded and built the Hubble Origins Probe.

    This failure is one of many that show that America is loosing the capability of space flight and research.

    From their website (http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/):

    The Hubble Origins Probe (HOP) is a proposed 2.4 meter free flying space telescope.The HOP concept is to replicate the design of the Hubble Space Telescope with a much lighter unaberrated mirror and optical telescope assembly, enabling a rapid path to launch, significant cost savings and risk mitigation. HOP will fly the instruments originally planned for the 4th HST servicing mission as well as a new very wide field imager, enhancing the original science mission of Hubble.

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  11. Re:Funding by Quantum+Fizz · · Score: 4, Informative
    A few other factors.

    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.