NASA Revives Main Hubble Telescope Camera

antikarma writes "NASA engineers successfully activated the Advanced Camera for Surveys at 9:12 a.m. EDT Friday aboard the agency's Hubble Space Telescope. Checkout was completed at 10:20 a.m. EDT with science observations scheduled to resume Sunday, July 2. 'This is the best possible news,' said Ed Ruitberg, deputy associate director for the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 'We were confident we could work through the camera issue, and now we can get back to doing more incredible science with the camera.'"

Comments

To Science

[Ckwop]

Due to Iraq and George Bush , most people in Western Europe have a little distain for the American Government. In fact, where I live, people often break in to an American accent when they do something stupid. I imagine this is because everyone sees Channel 4 news where we see the "Answers from Genesis museum" and thinks: "Only the stupid could indulge such nonsense."

With that necessary rant taken well and truly aside, I want to thank American for doing what no-one else can afford to do: put real science equipment in to space. It's your taxes that pay for the Hubble Space Telescope. This is a project that has furthered science in a very unique way. It is project that Galileo would have dreamed of. It is a marvel, a temple ,even, to science.....

With all the gratitude in my heart, I still feel America confuses me. To paraphrase the film Contact: "It is capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares." It is a land of contradiction; of promise and of despair. It is of science,and religion, of the smart and the idiot. It's is so huge that it contradicts and astounds. It is the country where opposites can be equally true.

As a British man, I love America and I hope the feeling is mutual. I raise this glass to the future of Science and hope you will raise your glass too! To Science!

Simon.

Re:To Science

[MyLongNickName]

Or, you could be involved in trying to fix it. Hate to break this to you, but this country has been in worse shape before. Do a google search on the history of this country in the decades after the civil war. Some of the things that went on make today look like a paradise. One state returned multiple sets of electoral college votes. House of Representatives choosing a president in return for agreements to remove troops from Southern states. voting shenanigans that make Deibold look honest.

Yet, this country pulled out of it. We have a system that allows good men to fix their country. As we see today, the Supreme Court acts as a break on a President who runs out of control, or a Congress. We have checks and balances and free speech.

Those tools pulled us out of a deeper bit only 150 years ago. A blip in the history of civilization. We can do the same today. Or we can just bitch and moan and throw up our hands.

The choice is yours.

Re:To Science

[cliffhanger407]

not to make you think that i support the war in iraq and all the "iraqi oil" we've gained (and also not to be a troll), but it's most definately american people who put the satellite there. the US has lost an absurd amount of money into the war in iraq and has gotten nothing out of it. if we were getting a plethora of oil from iraq, do you really think that we'd be paying $3 a gallon when before the war it was in the mid $1 range? But to the topic at hand. I know that hubble has a great impact on what people think about the astronomy community, but I think that it's necessary to truly assess the benefits of the system before we begin to worship it. The true discoveries are being made by newer, more advanced satellites with higher level optical and radar and x-ray sensors. Sure, Hubble has made some pretty pictures, but it has been a veritable engineering disaster since it was built (remember that whole deal with the mirror not being calibrated correctly on the ground and having to do a spacewalk in order to fix it?), which is part of why NASA was considering taking it out of the sky: it is simply not cost effective, nor is it producing the results necessary to justify its existence. So it's great that we've been able to preserve a relic of the early space-telescope era. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into believing that it will make an enormous difference in current day telescope power. Those discoveries are being made by ground-based telescopes which now have higher refinement than Hubble as well as ESA and new NASA telescopes orbiting the earth. Hubble has become a temple, as another user put it. It is beautiful to look at, but it very rarely produces dramatically pragmatic results which could not be received elsewhere.

Hubble

[paynesmanor]

Looking back what would have been cheaper? To launch a new better one that don't need costly repairs? Or to keep repairing one that was out of date before it actually worked? Hmm, Where's the math whizz when you need him?

Re:Hubble

[DerekLyons]

Looking back what would have been cheaper? To launch a new better one that don't need costly repairs? Or to keep repairing one that was out of date before it actually worked? Hmm, Where's the math whizz when you need him?

The problem is - it's not a straigtforward black and white accounting problem. There's a fair bit of psychology and politics in there as well.
 
It's easier to get money for a project already in progress, especially one showing results and with a high level of public popularity. It's much more difficult to do so for a 'start-up' project. In addition, the 'new' telescope would have had to weather years of budget cycles, in danger of cancellation each time - when it's constituency is small and there's nothing to show but a PowerPoint or two of what it *might* do. (That's assuming development went smoothly - a decidely dangerous assumption.)

+1 Inspiring

[quizzicus]

What you say rings true. However, my own interpretation of American history suggests that things will get worse before they get better. The concerned among us are still far too small a percentage of the population to draw the attention of the complacent masses. I mean, look at the issues that incumbents are banking on to get re-elected: Terrorism, Gay Marriage, and Flag Burning. Real issues, such as climate change, health care, and corruption go undiscussed because powerful interests pay an awful lot of money to keep it that way.

No, things will have to get pretty bad before we realize that Jesus isn't coming to fix it for us.