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."

Comments

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[54mc]

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!

Re:Funding

[cyclone96]

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.

Re:Funding

[helioquake]

...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.

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[amabbi]

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.

Of course

[Itninja]

"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...

Place your bets

[Joebert]

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".

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[McBainLives]

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.