NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Is Back In Business

Matt_dk writes "Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a 'perfect 10 both for performance and beauty.' (Meanwhile, the slowly declining Mars Phoenix Lander has now entered safe mode, according to reader CraftyJack.)

Comments

Safe mode?

[EagleRock]

The Mars Lander entered safe mode? Why do I have bad shivers all of a sudden? Must be my conditioned response from Windows.

good news: it's back in business

[Anonymous Coward]

bad news: gnaa hacked it to only show goatse

Re:Lander, not Rover

[RockMFR]

Clearly we need to be giving more original names to these things. What will happen when humans colonize the planet?

Mr Mars: "So, where do you live?"
Mr Mars: "I live on Mars Street in Mars City."
Mr Mars: "Oh really? So do I! Where do you work?"
Mr Mars: "Mars Corporation."
Mr Mars: "No way!"
Mars Dog: "woof woof"

The Rover is just "collecting science"

[svnt]

I knew those NASA guys were sandbagging.

Claiming to be carrying out "experiments" with "hypotheses," ha!

Re:The Rover is just "collecting science"

[Jesus_666]

Actually, science is a very limited resource and one of the Mars missions' most important goals is to see if Mars has any substantial science ore deposits and how we could mine them. It turned out that Martian soil actually contains small lumps of high-purity science ore, which the rovers collect. NASA is working on remotely using that almost-pure science to generate further insights into the Martian science deposits before Martian winter kills off the electronics. However, using impure science with equipment not designed for it has a high chance of failure and might, for example, generate data implying that tabletop cold fusion works.

NASA has already tried to remotely solve an issue by remotely throwing Martian science ore at it: The design of the Space Shuttle successor platform. The result was the Ares V launch vehicle, which now required copious amounts of refined Earth science to work around the scientific flaws caused by Martian science impurities. They have learned their lesson about lightly using insufficiently-refined science the hard way.

Unfortunately the NASA budget doesn't allow them to buy as much science as they would need so nowadays they usually rely on either recycled second-hand science or alternative sources of science like Mars. That's also why they desperately want to get Hubble back online - it was launched with a substantial science stockpile onboard and they really need to tap into that, even if the Hubble design limits the applications of onboard science mostly to deep-space observation.

Given how much science might be found on Mars I think NASA should really try to get Congress to open parts of the National Science Reserve to them - after all, if they manage to get a small science refinery up there they might relieve the already-strained world supply (and generate quite a bit of money by selling access to Martian science to other countries). This is especially important as leading science experts predict that we might reach peak science in less than twenty years.

Hubble could never be 'a perfect 10'

[Anonymous Coward]

Hubble had lens implants.

Re:Lander, not Rover

[EagleRock]

To be fair, we did name these things. The Lander is called the Phoenix, and the two current Mars Rovers are Spirit and Opportunity. Of course, if we keep this up, Mars will begin to sound like a highly patriotic US-version of Harry Potter. :-)

Re:Lander, not Rover

[Jesus_666]

As seen in the next Harry Potter books Harry Potter and the Stars, Stripes and Galaxies and Harry Potter and the Martian Real Estate Bubble.

...Mars Rover has now entered safe mode

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I didn't know it had a F8 key.

Now that we're in safe mode...

[roachdabug]

I guess now we can only get images in 640x480 with 256 colors...

Safe mode...

[BUL2294]

Well, at least they chose "Safe Mode with Networking" and now will be able to look at NTBTLOG.TXT from a distance. Of course, given that it takes up to 40 minutes for round-trip communications to happen, they had to change the default setting from 30 seconds to 2400+ seconds, otherwise the lander's would have died before loading the power monitoring service--resulting in an infinite loop.