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Hubble Camera Lost "For Good"
Several readers wrote in to tell us, following up on the recent story of the shutting down of Hubble's main camera, that program engineers are now saying that the camera is probably gone for good. The trouble resulted from a short circuit on Saturday in Hubble's most popular instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA engineers reported Monday that most of the camera's capabilities, including the ability to take the sort of deep cosmic postcards that have inspired the public, had probably been lost. We'll be pining for more of those amazing images until the James Webb launches in 2013.
Update: 01/30 23:28 GMT by KD : Reader Involved astronomer wrote in with an addendum / clarification to this story: "I'm a grant-funded astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (www.stsci.edu) in Baltimore. I am very concerned that the article conveys the wrong idea about HST. While HST's science capacity is diminished with the loss of ACS, HST lives on and will continue to produce world-class science, even before its servicing mission in Sept. 2008, which will upgrade the instrument suite with the most sophisticated imagers in history." Read on for the rest of his note. I'd like to point out these facts:
You can view one of our press releases on this here: http://hubblesite.org/acs/.
Update: 01/30 23:28 GMT by KD : Reader Involved astronomer wrote in with an addendum / clarification to this story: "I'm a grant-funded astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (www.stsci.edu) in Baltimore. I am very concerned that the article conveys the wrong idea about HST. While HST's science capacity is diminished with the loss of ACS, HST lives on and will continue to produce world-class science, even before its servicing mission in Sept. 2008, which will upgrade the instrument suite with the most sophisticated imagers in history." Read on for the rest of his note. I'd like to point out these facts:
- A fuse blew on ACS side two electronics — This will LIKELY (we're not 100% sure yet) render the Wide-field channel and the High-resolution channel (e.g. 2/3rds of the camera) inoperable. The solar blind channel will likely be returned to operation.
- While we have lost (2/3rds) of ACS, NICMOS and WFPC2, two fantastic imagers, are still operational. WFPC2 is responsible for many of the gorgeous images that grace many of your desktop wallpapers.
- ACS had an expected lifetime of 5 years. It met that lifetime. The loss of ACS, while of course disappointing, is not necessarily a shock.
- Servicing mission 4 is currently scheduled for Sept. 2008. It will upgrade HST to never-before-seen scientific capability and productivity. The Wide-Field Camera 3, which will be installed then, will essentially be an even more sophisticated successor to ACS.
You can view one of our press releases on this here: http://hubblesite.org/acs/.
Before anyone asks: the upcoming shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope is already booked solid with other work.
We'll be pining for more of those amazing images until the James Webb launches in 2013.
Will those images be of the fjords?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
while. I'd always post the latest Hubble image as my desktop wallpaper. I'm sure many other people did this too.
You mean this one?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
the problem I have with the James-Webb telescope is it isn't a *replacement* for Hubble. JW is a non-visible (infrared) scope, and won't produce the type of images Hubble has.
keeping the masses 'in favor' of spending on space involves giving them some of the stuff they want, namely the magnificent pictures Hubble has been providing for years.
If they can't see it, then they won't want to fund it as much.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
My problem with the administration (and Congress) was that it cut NASA's funding. NASA had budgeted the James Webb to go online in 2013 and the Hubble to be serviced until 2013 so there would not be any disruption in service. With budget cuts, NASA had to make hard choices. At the same time, the administration was pushing NASA to start a program to put a man on Mars--an effort that would cost many times more than keeping the Hubble going. That's where I put the blame on the decisions in policy, not so much the "evilness" but policy.
For those out there who say that there is a replacement on the way, bear in mind the replacement is 6 years away. That's not too far away, right? Tell that to a scientist who has waited patiently for years for some time with the Hubble. He or she is going to have to do something else in the meantime. Science will have to wait.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"NASA" doesn't want to end it per se, there are people who work on that project and use the data who would like to see it continue. The issue is whether there are sufficient funds to keep the Hubble telescope going, while taking care of other ongoing missions and work to prepare for the planned future missions. If congress hands NASA a lump of cash and tells them "This is for Hubble", Hubble will be serviced. Until that happens, there's a lot of work to be done before we have our shuttle replacement and a manned base on the moon. My humble opinion, not the opinion of NASA, legalese blah blah blah, but based on observation.
GPL: Free as in will
For those of you that don't know, Hubble still has two working instruments, the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) and NICMOS. Both instruments are very capable of still doing good science. In fact, until 2002 the beautiful images we see were mostly from WFPC2, ACS wasn't installed until the last servicing mission. NICMOS is a near-infrared camera and still works fine. I would assume that repairing ACS would be a big priority now since its camera provided the best scientific data.
For those of you questioning whether or not Hubble should be serviced or just wait for James Webb, you ought to know that Hubble and James Webb will not cover the same wavelengths. Hubble covers UV, visible, and near-infrared. James Webb will cover Near to mid-infrared. James Webb can't do all the science that Hubble can and vice versa. However, ground-based adaptive optics imaging are hoped to be able to provide image quality as good as Hubble by the time it is ready to be retired sometime in the next decade. Also, because of the atmosphere, from the ground, we cannot observe all the infrared wavelengths that James Webb will be able to.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Yes this is very sad but even without ACS Hubble still has WFP2 and NICMOS so its entirely worth servicing it because it can still do bleeding edge science. I don't think there is much hope for servicing ACS. Most of the large ground based telescopes come equipped with atmospheric dispersion correctors (two fancy counter-rotating prisms) and Shack-Hartmann sensors and these along with the larger primary make up a lot of the difference for some science purposes, though ACS will be sorely missed and soon. HST proposals were due recently so they'll probably extend the call for proposals by a few weeks but there will be a lot of unhappy folks who will have to go back to the drawing board so to speak and start from scratch.
s earch/acs/viewall/1 and you can get some pretty stunning images from the ground with relatively small telescopes - some of the bigger names in astrophotography like Robert Gendler, Neil Fleming, Ron Wodawski do some stunning stuff.
If you still want pretty pictures for your desktop - this is not really the point but its astronomy for the soul which is very important - then theres a fairly large collection of ACS images http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/free
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
What if the NSA pointed one of their old drifting recon birds the wrong way and refocused it a few million light years from here?
I realize the optics aren't set up to do far-field imaging, but maybe it'd be cheaper and quicker than waiting to fix the Hubble?
An intriguing idea. However, I don't think it will work. The focus would not be the major issue though, as the difference in focussing between 500km and 500pc is relatively minor.
I suspect the main issue would be noise. Hubble's CCDs were specifically designed to have the lowest possible noise, whereas in the case of an NSA satellite, they have so much more signal from Earth (>1000x) than from the next dimmest thing in the solar system that the system might not be physically capable of taking the necessary long exposures. However, they might be able to do some sort of astronomy with a series of stacked images, much as is done with web cam astronomy. Anyway, just some thoughts... there are probably other reasons it hasn't been done yet that I haven't thought of yet....
Actually, although the Advanced Camera for Surveys produces some of the deepest and highest resolution images, especially of distant objects, it is the wide-field planetary camera that produces a lot of the most memorable images, such as the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula.
Hubblesite.org has a good layman's description of the instruments on the Hubble.
Also, we're still getting many fine images of the planets, stars, galaxies, and nebulae around us from the Spitzer and the multitude of ground-based scopes that make great backgrounds. And don't forget the fantastic Mars rovers or Cassini.
I know. These images suck from the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope.
There is absolutely no way that we can extrapolate any color from those images.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Man oh man, they should have used a circuit breaker instead of a fuse. I'd hate to get up there with a bag of those little fuses and find out I had to go back to the service station for the right one.