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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
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!
Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
But don't let that get in the way of your ignorant, uninformed, nonsensical political rant.
"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...
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
That's fancy talk for "Placing bets on what's going to break next".
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
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.
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
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 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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I believe that would be dust.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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.
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.