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Hubble Telescope's Main Camera Shuts Down
anthemaniac writes "Space.com is reporting that the aging observatory's primary camera, the ACS, has been in safe mode since the weekend. From the article: 'An initial investigation indicates the camera has stopped functioning, and the input power feed to its Side B electronics package has failed.' The camera has shut down before and been revived."
Space.com is reporting that the aging observatory's primary camera, the ACS, has been in safe mode since the weekend.
No wonder they can't contact it. Safe Mode doesn't support networking by default.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Wasn't the shuttle scheduled to do one-last service call on Hubble? This is despite NASA's foot-dragging
and originally deciding NOT to service it and just retire it.
Gee, if it's fried, then they can't do a normal maintenance and can save $100M on a launch....
And if it's just been told to "roll over and play dead"......
The summary clearly states that the article clearly states that the problem is with an input power feed, and not with the 486 used to control the cameras:
'An initial investigation indicates the camera has stopped functioning, and the input power feed to its Side B electronics package has failed.'
I think it's awfully convenient how the Hubble telescope's camera periodically "shuts down" like this. Could it be the Hubble saw something the government doesn't want us to see?
We need data feeds from taxpayer-funded equipment like the Hubble to be made freely available so that the public can make their own decisions about the information being gathered.
I'm inclined to trust NASA for the most part, but in this day and age, what with Habeas Corpus being eroded away, you can't be too careful.
and choose "Last known good configuration."
Well ya, it's aging. So is everything else in the universe, at the rate of one second per second. Geez I hate it when reporters use that word to make something sound old.
Since they have already said that repair missions to the hubble scope are off the agenda, sooner or later its going to die. There are replacements on the way anyhow.
Personally I think they should boost it into higher orbit so it stays safe for future space archeologists. The same bods who will eventually be interested in retreiving the Viking missions, and who knows, if we get fast enough ships, the voyagers.
No biggie. Just F8 on startup
Truly spoken like an ignorant retard. Or a troll, in which case I'm falling for it. This "POS" is one of the greatest astronomical instrument ever devised, and has yielded enough data for years of study to come. There's a reason why scientist want to keep it around.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/01/18/china.mis sile/index.html
Engineering is the art of compromise.
why waste it in such a fashion. The shuttle is designed to retrieve it. how much could the smithsonian get for having that on display.
That would be a good thing for Nasa to do.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Maybe they shouldn't have installed Sony batteries in the camera.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
Hmm, did defunct Chinese weather satelite debris damage Hubble?..
...I do not think it means what you think it means.
In Soviet Russia... they don't have cameras.
Assuming the space shuttle is retired after 2010, which seriously looks unlikely, how would they keep it alive? Soyuz and Shenzou are the only vehicles with air locks.
It looks like the space shuttle is going to be around long after 2010 and Hubble repairs may continue indefinitely. The appropriations for replacing the shuttle were finally canceled and there's too much voter pressure to fund low Earth orbit science.
RTFA: It was restored from safemode on Sunday -.-
They are hoping to switch it back over to the primary power supply and get limited usage until the shuttle gets there.
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
by "public data" he means 8mb JPGs with color and false color correction emailed to him at troll@aol.com
It shorted, and burned enough plastic or wiring to trip the overpressure sensor (do wire shorts smell in space?). See this message from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Side A electronics are available which might be able to run a portion of the instrument. This has been expected since the first failure last summer, and "contingency" proposals are available to keep the observatory running using its other instruments (ACS has recently been the most used).
We have a telescope in orbit that's servicable. It seems to me that the big, expensive part of this marvel would be the large optical reflector. Unless someone could point out a reason otherwise, would it not make sense to just keep making camera upgrades to put on the end of this thing? Yes, I realize that I may be oversimplying this procedure, but if it's not feasible to service it in the near future, is there something wrong with tucking it away in a safe orbit until it would become feasible...or clearly determine that the telescope has reached the end of its useful life and then de-orbit it?
Heck, if privatized, manned spaceflight is just around the corner, sell the silly thing to a private entity so they can fix it up and sell operating (viewing) time on it. Richard Branson and his ilk could have a field day with it.
I guess they'll have to edit out the "Safe Mode" words in each corner of every picture it'll take from now on...
Hope they're in more than 16 colours!
the ACS, has been in safe mode since the weekend
Oh no, it runs Windows?!?
I've heard that it was designed to be brought down by the Challanger, which was unfortuantly lost. The Challanger had a slightly larger cargo bay, so any other shuttle would have to be overhauled in order for it to fit.
I don't read AC A human right
China have a demonstrated ability to kill a satellite. Why not use this to get Hubble, or for that matter, any other satellite down?
NASA have proven their inability to produce the right transport for many jobs. The shuttle is woefully old, unreliable, expensive and inappropriate for many of the tasks it is used for. Likely much of the reason is that NASA is not a scienfici or engineering body, it is by its own name an **administration**. Rather than try do everything themselves or pork-barrel subcontractors, it can make a lot of sense to just outsource work to people who have cheaper technology.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Are the mods sleeping today? Why does a response to a troll get modded a troll? Can someone at least take enough time to select the appropriate message to mod?
Since Hubble was orbited using Discovery, I doubt it.
How is Globeco Space Dynamics a wholly owned subsidiary of Pepsico-Halliburton-Virgin Atlantic-ELF Aquitane going to worry about some damn space telescope for a bunch of scientists who don't have any money? Are you guys high? Seriously
As long as the photos don't come back at 640x480 in 8-bit color with a "safe mode" watermark in each corner...
Sony ha
Main camera turn on! Sorry. :P
I hope it is fixable. Hubble is pretty cool.
Safe mode. Stopped functioning. Needs to be rebooted to make it work. Anyone for a game of word association?
The Advanced Camera for Surveys wasn't installed until the third servicing mission in 2002. It's been problematic since then. If it can be installed on a spacewalk, it can be replaced on a spacewalk.
Also, the Hubble servicing mission has been approved. Barring some act of God or Congress, Atlantis will conduct this mission on STS-125 in May of 2008. The ACS was not on the itinerary for service, but it might still be possible to add it to the agenda or push back the mission date if need be. On the other hand, it might be possible to work around whatever problem caused the latest shutdown, the third according to Wikipedia.
I should point out the foot dragging was largely spurred on by calls for the retirement of the shuttle as soon as possible (even immediately) and some general hysteria following the Columbia incident (as opposed to the rational re-examination that also took place). There is also the issue of the cost, which is in the range of hundreds of millions and had not been provided for, and a difference of philosophy between O'Keefe (administrator until 2005) and Griffin (current admin). Mission development is fully provided for in 2007, and should be in the 2008 budget, too.
If Hubble was going to roll over and play dead, it should've done so back in mid-2005, before more money had been spent on the servicing mission.
FTA:
In all seriousness, though, it's worth noting that this camera is comparatively new (installed 12 years after launch) and that it's failed more or less on schedule. Too bad NASA doesn't plan on sending a mission until next year. Also worth noting is that it's not the only instrument on the telescope... though it is the one that takes the purty pictures that garner mainstream attention.
The parent is not informative, it is wrong, or at least out of date.
The Space Shuttle will be retired upon completion of the ISS. NASA will be taking steps over the coming years which would prevent almost any extension of the currently planned flight schedule, like reconfiguring launch pads to support the future vehicles, retiring shuttle craft as they complete their scheduled missions, caniballizing said vehicles for parts, and refraining from ordering parts like external tanks and solid rocket boosters which would be required to extend the schedule by even one flight.
The shuttle will cease operations regardless of the status of replacement vehicles. Although many planned technology programs intended to help replace the shuttle with a more reliable and cost effective system were cancelled over the years, NASA is currently pursuing a manned vehicle program, Orion which has not been cancelled.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
None of the up coming space telescopes, nor anything on the ground can do what this machine can do. The new projects look for different things and the ground based systems can't look at a single point in space for a long duration image set. Check out this video, it blew me away:
Having the datastream (raw, not the processed images), from NASA satellites freely available would eliminate any chance that they might try to "protect" us from something we may or may not be ready for. Chances are (and its 1000-1), that this has never occured, but honestly...if they DID see something strange, really strange, would they show us? The answer is they probably wouldn't, not unless we were "ready".
That's because if you mention a moderation category (such as Insightful) anywhere in your post, regardless of its relevance, it increases the chance of that post being modded as such.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Jargon alert for non specialists: ACS = Advanced Camera for Surveys; WFC = Wide Field Camera; HRC = High Resolution Camera; SBC = Solar Blind Channel; CCD = charge coupled device; WFPC2 = Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (an older instrument); STScI = Space Telescope Science Institute; and GSFC = Goddard Space Flight Center.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Only Me (A Hubble Tribute)
To the tune of "Only you"
By Joel Gilmore, 2007
Looking at the sky up above
Taking photos with love,
Can you fix me?
Found out only yesterday,
my orbit's soon to decay
Can't you boost me?
Chorus:
All I needed was a manned space flight
All I needed for another night
Since 1993 -
only me.
If I lose one more gyroscope
I don't know if I'll cope,
Send Discovery!
Install Wide Field Camera 3,
Spectrograph, batteries,
My camera's dying!
Chorus:
All I needed was a manned space flight
All I needed for another night
Until James Webb, there'll be -
only ME!
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
No Hubble thread would be complete without the Hubble Deep Field, the Hubble Deep Field South and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Most satellites have redundancy built in to them in order to have a back when i a main component fails. Take a communications satellite, if the signal amp dies a redundant one is available to be turned on by its earth based ground control using a series of complicated procedures. With something as unique and complicated as the Hubble it is no surprise that there is either no yet written procedure for how to do this or they want to diagnose what caused the failure to prevent it from happening to the auxiliary unit.
As to the planned shuttle service it may be that it include a fuel up to replenish the thruster fuel which possibly would have run out with the complicated positioning required to do some of its many studies of what is in space.
The new ACS, with 4x pixels, has been sitting on a shelf ready to go for 4 years now.
The astronauts are already practicing the 6-hour job that will allow
them to fix STIS. It involves unscrewing 100+ non-captive
screws in micro-gravity, something that was never accounted for during
the original design.
I work at STScI and it sounds like they're going to be able to switch ACS back to the side 1 power supply. Unfortunately, it means that the WFC which is the most used won't be working. A failure of the side 1 supply to WFC is why they had to switch to side 2 this summer.
The good news is that WFPC2 is still working even if it doesn't have the imaging area or sensitivity of ACS. The telescope allocation committee just re-opened applications for next cycle so lots of people are just going to switch their proposals from using ACS to using WFPC2 (myself included). As a side note: anyone can apply for telescope time since its run with taxpayer money. Just go to the site and fill out the form.
The other good news is that the servicing mission is going ahead for early 2008 when they're going to put in WFPC3 which is a bit better than ACS and will have much lower distortions and a great new spectrograph called COS. That'll take HST to the end of its life in 2013. At that point, the next space telescope, JWST, will be launched. In case you're wondering though, JWST will have a much shorter life since it won't be possible to service it.
So yeah, it sucks that ACS smoked itself but it's not the end of the world.
A good point, except that I'm not certain that Discovery hasn't been refitted since the launch 15 years ago. I have heard similar stories from people people pretty close to HST (other astronomers who have used it), so there may be truth in the rumor that either Challenger or Columbia was intended to bring it down. (And remember, the shuttle has to be able to hold the telescope *and* land with it. It's possible that the remaining craft aren't robust enough to handle the landing.)
I have yet to see a definitive answer on why they won't retrieve HST, but I do think it's difficult to rule the above out. (Of course, it seems more likely that it's just a mattter of logistics.)
This is a tragedy and the first step in the decommission process. NASA is terribly underfunded already (Hey..all those guys NEED $289 toilet seats...) and this will be just one more excuse to cut back more. The Hubble is the best project NASA has right now and for the forseeable future (get it...?) :)
http://www.kontentdesign.com/
It was sent to orbit in discovery, but in the meantime, an ISS-compatible airlock has been put in the cargo bay, which is now too small to hold hubble.
I heard an update from a Lookheed Martin engineer last week.
Orion is on schedule, a bit overweight within design tolerances.
This engineer will be doing a field test of the emergency escape system in 2008.
I have yet to see a definitive answer on why they won't retrieve HST, but I do think it's difficult to rule the above out. (Of course, it seems more likely that it's just a mattter of logistics.)
The bottom line is that they're not going to send up a half-billion-dollar shuttle mission and risk astronauts' lives just to bring HST back (and that's all it would or could do). They had a hard enough time justifying the upcoming servicing mission.
That falls under "logistics", I do believe. But I honestly don't think it's the safety or the cost: they're still building ISS, which is just as useless as retrieving HST. It's just a question of which symbolic, political money sink do you fund.