NASA To Repair Hubble By Remote Control

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 15, 2008 @01:23AM from the in-my-day-i-had-to-walk-over-and-do-it-manually dept.

Matt_dk writes "NASA says it plans to fix the Hubble Space Telescope by remote control this week. The Hubble stopped beaming information to Earth about two weeks ago, when a data unit on the telescope completely failed. Scientists on Tuesday said they will bypass the failed unit and switch to a back-up system to restart the flow of information. The computer glitch forced NASA to postpone a shuttle mission this month to repair the Hubble. That shuttle mission has been postponed until next year." Update - 10/15, 17:45 by SS: Readers have pointed out further details from Spaceflight Now and the NASA press release.

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Re:I'm curious... by Deadstick · 2008-10-15 03:12 · Score: 0, Redundant

Do they have several mock ups?
They have actual duplicate examples of onboard units, as well as "breadboard" versions built for easy access to the innards.
A complete computer model of the whole thing, emulated right down to hardware and software?
Betcher sweet ass.
How are reboot/reprogram sequences like this handled/practiced/tested?
Endlessly.
Even at design stage I imagine failure modes are extensively analyzed and multiple redundancy built in.
Yes they are. But before switching in a redundant unit, you want to be very sure you know exactly what happened where. The last thing you want to do is to "switch into a short".
rj