Hubble Camera Shuts Down

Maggie McKee writes "Hubble's main camera is offline again, but the problem does not appear to be with its power supply, like it was this summer. This time, the issue seems to be the electronics on the sharpest of its three camera-like channels, the High Resolution Channel. NASA says the worst-case scenario is that the ACS could lose half the channel's field of view, so it would take longer to observe its targets. If the problems are truly unrelated, it's been an especially unlucky few months for this instrument!"

Comments

Back on topic

[djuuss]

On a slightly more serious note:

Like the article says, its not that big a deal until we know if this malfunction is fixable. From TFA:

Vision loss Burch is optimistic that the ACS and even the High Resolution Channel itself will still be usable, although he stresses that the outlook could change as engineers obtain new information about the problem. Still, the problem could mean that the HRC will be able to use only half of its normal field of view in future observations, Burch says. "We would have to take more observations to cover a given area [of the sky], but that's far from the end of the world for us," he told New Scientist. Malcolm Niedner, deputy project scientist for Hubble at Goddard, agrees with that assessment. "None of us is talking about the loss of HRC," he told New Scientist. Losing half of the channel's field of view is being talked about as "a worst-case scenario," he says.

In other words, stay tuned for next exciting installment of 'Hubble, the incredible cyclops.'

Re:cue the shuttle enthusiasts

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Good. I'm fine with one last major repair mission. There won't be a replacement to the Hubble and it is the only decent telescope for some wavelengths, those that the atmosphere absorbs which no ground telescope can touch. The Webb won't really be a replacement.

Re:This time, its the Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've quit with your first 2 sentences -- instead you had to go on one of your usual misinformed rants.

"shuttle exploded" -- not what happened (http://caib.nasa.gov/)

"space station, would not have been a reality if it were not for Russian participation" -- not true at all. The US has essenitally funded all Russian participation in the project. The only reason we brought them on board was to keep them from selling their services to the Chinese. Additionally, we lose about 20000 lbs of lift capability each launch to the station because we put it in an orbit that the Russians could get to also. Would've been cheaper to do it all ourselves.

Re:This time, its the Americans...

[chebucto]

Two space shuttles have been lost; one of them exploded (or at least that's how it looked on tv), and the other burned up in the atmosphere. RIP to the astronauts. As far as I remember, the great evil in the world at the time when the ISS was being built wasn't the chinese, it was rogue states and criminal gangs. That, at least, was the justification for a bunch of make-work programs for former soviet rocket and nuclear scientists. Regarding building the thing, you american's didn't just rely on russian heavy-lift, you also relied on a good deal of russian space-station technology that was developed and refined for the Mir. Things like CO2 converters and such. Remmeber, the russians had spent a hell of a lot more time in space stations than the americans did when the ISS was being built. And, an orbit friendlier to the american launch locations woudn't have made any difference when the shuttle was grounded for however many months it was during these past few years.

Re:cue the shuttle enthusiasts

[Shag]

With shuttle trips running on the order of a billion dollars these days, what will generate more actual scientific data? Squander those kind of funds on a rocket ride to fix the aging hubble, or, invest half of it in modern ground based observing infrastructure, then take the other half and feed it into the scientific welfare system known as grants over a period of 20 years.

Modern ground based observing infrastructure... we've already got that, don't we? With adaptive optics or interferometry, Keck can get angular detail smaller than the best plate scale Hubble has available. Combining AO and interferometry, they should be able to do almost 10x better than Hubble. And the technology being developed for Webb? The instrument labs aren't in space. The prototype of the 16-megapixel sensor array for NIRCAM (which will be on Webb) lives at the U. of Hawaii observatory, in a three-year-old camera called ULBCAM. Production versions of the array have already been built into cameras for other terrestrial observatories, including the WFCAM wide-field camera at the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). So by the time Webb launches, this will be "old" tried-and-true technology.

Yes, there are some things that are developed specifically for use in space, then found to be useful for something on earth, but a lot more things that are sent into space are designed, developed, prototyped, and as the case above shows sometimes even implemented on the ground long before they go into space.

Re:cue the shuttle enthusiasts

[DerekLyons]

With shuttle trips running on the order of a billion dollars these days, what will generate more actual scientific data? Squander those kind of funds on a rocket ride to fix the aging hubble, or, invest half of it in modern ground based observing infrastructure,

Spending on Hubble - absolutely no question. Ground based infrastructure (no matter how modern) cannot;

• see the wavelengths that Hubble can (they don't penetrate the atmosphere)
• see as faint an object as Hubble can (the light doesn't penetrate the atmosphere)
• see as fine a details as Hubble can (that pesky atmosphere again - though here they are getting better, but still nowhere near what Hubble can do),

No matter how much you spend you cannot overcome the first two limitations, and third is still somewhere in the misty future. To some extent, more ground infrastructure (though we can always use more) is just 'more of the same'. Hubble is unique. (And don't bring up the JWST - it 'sees' in different wavelengths than Hubble.) No amount of money can change the laws of physics.
 
Having said that last - I just *know* somebody will pipe up with 'but how do we know there is not some undiscovered principle'. How? This is 2006 - not 1806 or even 1906. These things have been intensively studied - and no principle exists to make the atmosphere transparent to UV. None. Not now, not ever. The same goes for extremely faint objects - barring intervention from Harry Potter the atmosphere isn't going to become less turbulent and more transparent.

Re:If they decide to fix it

[decsnake]

here's a reference for you:

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0512/05hubbleservi cing/