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.

Re:Safe mode?

[davester666]

Yes. From the ping times, the OS determined it was no longer on or orbiting planet earth, and thus, required an additional "non-terrestrial" license.

In Microsoft's defense, it did put up a dialog with a phone number to call to purchase the license.

Lander, not Rover

[Ertman]

It's the Mars Lander (Phoenix), not the Mars Rover, that is going into standby.

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"

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.

Re:Lander, not Rover

[EagleRock]

Yeah, yeah, it was a typo. Thanks for the help, fellow Calvin and Hobbes lovers. :-)

Re:Lander, not Rover

[SpaceLifeForm]

Yep, the Mars Rovers did not die before Vista came out.

They seem to be well engineered and have a longer shelf life.

Re:Lander, not Rover

[ozbird]

Sounds more like anime characters to me, but then I'm not a rocket scientist.

good news: it's back in business

[Anonymous Coward]

bad news: gnaa hacked it to only show goatse

Rover?

[gregoryb]

They're not shutting down the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, correct? They're talking about shutting down the Lander, Phoenix. The Rovers are still going strong.

Re:Rover?

[EagleRock]

Lots of confusion...but yes, Spirit and Opportunity are still going strong. It's the Mars Lander Phoenix that's entering safe mode due to failing electronics and deteriorating climate.

Re:Rover?

[arth1]

Lots of confusion...but yes, Spirit and Opportunity are still going strong. It's the Mars Lander Phoenix that's entering safe mode due to failing electronics and deteriorating climate.

Deteriorating climate?
Surely the climate is fairly stable on Mars, and it's just seasons and weather changes?
Or is Mars undergoing climate changes?

Re:Rover?

[EagleRock]

I meant as in worsening weather conditions. The area the Mars Lander is in has gotten much colder this week and it has been forced to stop scientific functions and focus solely on preserving itself (heating, etc.).

Re:Let's hope

[EagleRock]

Good call. It'd really be a shame for the project to end so abruptly. Though, I don't think we'll see the successes we had of the Mars Rovers, especially, since they lasted way beyond their expected life. I think their mobility really helped that along, and the lack of that is killing the current lander.

Re:Still blurry

[Chaos Incarnate]

It's unfocused because it's not a true visible-light image, and because it's assembled from three images taken over two days. Drift happens.

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.

Re:The Rover is just "collecting science"

[Fluffeh]

I can't wait till the japanese send out scientific vessels to nearby planets. To perform scientific "experiments" on the wildlife. Experiments where the wildlife ends up in meals back home.

Re:Let's hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from a comment on
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/30/hubble-telescope-back-on-the-air/

# Dan Fischer Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:09 am

Seems youâ(TM)ve missed the new bad news for Hubble, namely trouble with the ground spare that is to go up with the shuttle - this mission is now in danger. Todays NASA telecon (at 21:00 UTC) will be interesting â¦

Hubble could never be 'a perfect 10'

[Anonymous Coward]

Hubble had lens implants.

zzzz

[apodyopsis]

The lander may be shutting down, but its work remembering that its done its job and exceeded 2.5 times its planned life span.

If everything I designed lasted 2.5 times its product life I would be happy.

Re:zzzz

[EagleRock]

I don't know if the Phoenix is past its expect life yet. I thought the project was expected to go until the end of the year. It is the Mars Rovers that have gone way past their expected life, as they landed back in 2004.

Re:zzzz

[tgd]

Its 2.5 times past its expected life.

The rovers are like cockroaches, nothing will kill them. They're closer to 20x.

Re:zzzz

[redxxx]

It's not shutting down per se. It's in a polar region and winter is coming, it's diverting most of the diminishing solar energy it receives to generating hear, so it won't be damaged by the cold. It will still be operational, just operating in a mode that isn't very useful for doing science.

Nothing's broken. It's last longer than was planned, and now they are taking steps so there is a chance it will last longer still.

Re:zzzz

[alexj33]

If you meet a wolf, would a wolf wolf meat with a "woof woof" in a wolf meet?

Re:zzzz

[EagleRock]

Of course not, silly. Lawn chairs don't have spectrometers.

Re:zzzz

[CheshireCatCO]

To be fair, the 90 days wasn't really a planned lifespan, that was the prime mission that they needed to finish to be a "success". I suspect that the reason for this is partly funding: NASA likes to fund projects in increments in case something does go wrong. (They don't write a lot of software until the spacecraft is successfully launched, for example.) Plus, but low-balling the life expectancy, they can amaze everyone with what a great bargain the mission is when it outlives it.

I don't think anyone really expected the Phoenix lander to die at around 90 days in as much as almost all missions that are successful in any reasonable sense (in other words, don't blow up on launch, miss Mars, or whatever) outlive their nominal missions by quite a bit. Look at Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, or Cassini.

Re:zzzz

[Nyeerrmm]

Actually from what I've heard its marginally broken. They were having trouble getting it into safe mode but managed to communicate with it and shut it down yesterday. However, its not responding today, so it seems it doesnt have enough reserve power to keep itself properly warmed. However, my friend (who was telling me about the issues today) mentioned some kind of "Lazarus Mode" that may let it wake up again come spring.

And apparently they're still able to get a lot of good climatological data off of it, among other things, so its definitely worth keeping alive; I say this because my default assumption was that because it can't move its inherently limited lifetime, that after a certain period of time it couldn't get much new data.

Re:zzzz

[dotancohen]

Its 2.5 times past its expected life.

The rovers are like cockroaches, nothing will kill them. They're closer to 20x.

Phoenix is at the end of its expected life of three to four months, which differs from it's planned primary mission lifespan of only 90 days. Note that not all the ovens have been used during the primary mission, as the craft was expected to last longer.

The rovers also had only 90 day primary missions. They are now 5 years past that, just about x20 that you mention.

Re:Let's hope

[f1vlad]

I am still amazed how long those rovers lasted.

Funding to the right place?

[Ngarrang]

And now back to our regularly scheduled program "Diverting Funding from New Space Telescope Technology"

I am your host, Marlin Perkins, and this week, we are sending Jim into space to repair the HST instead of focusing our funding on newer telescope technology.

I understand that the James Webb telescope thingy is not a visible light 'scope. But, do you wonder what kind of HST replacement we could have had already if we had not spent so much time and money on repairs?

Re:Funding to the right place?

[CheshireCatCO]

Well, let's think about that, shall we? HST's total cost was about $1.5 billion when it was launched in 1990. (If that figure is 1990 dollars, it's nearly $2.5 billion now.) Being generous, we can figure a shuttle repair mission is around $0.5 billion, so four servicing missions are worth about $2 billion, comparable to the cost of a new Hubble. James Webb ST, by comparison, is estimated to cost $4.5 billion over its lifetime, so you'd get half of a new 'scope for the cost of keeping the old one working.

As with most things, wearing out what you have is more economical than buying a new one (no matter what advertisers want us to think).

On the other hand, if you really want new telescopes, you'd be best-served to not play them off of each other. This isn't a zero sum game and NASA's budget is a trifle compared to other Federal agencies. Rather than denigrated HST, why not seek them money from DoD research projects, for instance?

Re:Funding to the right place?

[Chris Burke]

But, do you wonder what kind of HST replacement we could have had already if we had not spent so much time and money on repairs?

What do you mean, "already"? There would have had to have been a proposal many years ago in order to be operational today. As far as I know, the James Webb was the first space telescope proposed after Hubble, it's not supposed to go online until 2013, and there are no plans even as of today for a new visible light space telescope. Also as far as I know, the Hubble service missions have not impacted the plan for the JWST.

So while I can imagine many things, practically speaking the only visible light space telescope I see us having without the repairs to Hubble is no visible light space telescope.

Re:Funding to the right place?

[Nyeerrmm]

In addition to the previous posters, who seem pretty on top of it, identifying that repairs are still cheaper than a new one, I'd also point out that space-based visible telescopes aren't as important now as they were in the nineties. The main reason to get it off of the surface is to eliminate the 'seeing' effects of the atmosphere, the way turbulence distorts signals and reduces the maximum resolution to ~1 arcsec (I think). This is the same reason that the big ones are built in high, arid places.

One of the biggest developments since then is the implementation of adaptive optics systems, which use active controls to warp the mirrors and eliminate the errors caused by atmospheric perturbations. This theoretically allows a ground-based telescope to achieve diffraction-limited resolution; I say theoretically because as far as I know most implementations suffer from a situation where you'll get top performance only a fraction of the time. However, it does mean you can get a much larger scope for much cheaper, reducing the utility of a space telescope.

A Hubble-style design is limited by weight and volume to about the size it is now, meaning that you can't do much to improve it, except with electronics to improve throughput. It's limited because it requires holding the entire structure stiff, to within ~10 nanometers, through all of launch and deployment, and without drastically larger launch vehicles, thats what we're left with. Of course, going to a flexible adaptive structure, like that of JWST, could allow much larger, lighter scopes to be deployed in space. But considering that JWST was quoted above as being ~$4bln, in order to improve it to optical precision would probably raise it to $6bln. So maybe one day, but the cost/benefit ratio just doesn't seem to get you there at this point... particularly when HST can be kept running for another 5 years for only $.5bln.

Why JWST is still going though, is because much of the IR range is blocked by the atmosphere, so theres no way to use any kind of advanced control technology to remove the problems caused by the atmosphere.

Re:Still blurry

[photonic]

It's unfocused because it's not a true visible-light image, and because it's assembled from three images taken over two days. Drift happens.

Citation needed. Focusing has nothing to do with light being visible. You can focus shorter wavelengths like x-rays or longer wavelengths like they do in radio astronomy. And you claim about drift (of focus?) is also odd. I don't know anything about Hubble's focusing mechanism, but I assume they either do it for every image, or they only calibrate it every month or so. It is not like they let their camera slowly drift out of focus over a few days or so. Drift in pointing should also not happen, since Hubble has one of most accurate guidance sensors up there in space.

...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...

Re:Still blurry

[dimeglio]

I think for a picture of something that's 400 million light year away, it's pretty sharp. If you look carefully, you can even see the face of the amazing Mephistopheles at the bottom of the bluish galaxy (the orangy part). Just in time for Haloween.

Re:Still blurry

[Chaos Incarnate]

Citation for it not being a true visible-light image: TFA. Yes, you can focus the other wavelengths, but they're not necessarily all emitting in the same shape, so when combined they don't necessarily fit together right. (I think that's poorly explained, for which I apologize.)

As for the drift, I was referring to the physical objects themselves (both Hubble and the galaxies); if they move between when each of the three pictures were taken, they won't line up exactly in the final image where they're combined, resulting in a blurred appearance.

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.

how f*cking cool is that picture ?

[cats-paw]

One galaxy going _through_ another ?

Mind boggling !

Re:how f*cking cool is that picture ?

[Ollabelle]

Yeah, but I'm disappointed NASA didn't post a picture big enough to use as a desktop.

Re:how f*cking cool is that picture ?

[Chris Tucker]

Ollabelle, take a look here for some larger images, including a TIFF which should be scalable to your desktop size.

Re:how f*cking cool is that picture ?

[Chris Burke]

How fucking cool?

Super fucking cool!

Not Quite

[pavon]

The primary mission was planned to take 92 days, and we are currently on day 158 and counting, a factor of about 1.76 so far. Furthermore that 92 days was just the tentative science schedule, not the designed lifespan. The lander was designed to last until winter hit.

Re:Still blurry

[photonic]

No. Apart from objects that emit at different 'shapes' due to different physics (stellar dust in the infrared, some stars towards UV or X-ray), a star emits more or less in the same 'shape' at all wavelengths. You will see it more blurry at long wavelengths than at shorter onces, but that is due to the diffraction limit, but that has nothing to do with focusing. And galaxies do not drift over a span of a few days. You'd be happy if you see a nearby star move by a few arc-seconds over half a year, and those are within our own galaxy. As mentioned before, Hubble has state of the art fine guidance sensors, so I do not expect any drift in Hubble either. Overlapping a few images is also easy, you just use a few point like stars that appear in all colors.

Arp 147?

[adavies42]

Cue the Electric Universe evangelists in 3 ... 2 ...
Seriously, /. was full of them six months ago. I wonder where they all went?

Can the next lander take nuclear power please?

[Morgaine]

The most interesting thing by far for the next polar (or near-polar) Mars lander to do would be to watch the winter ice caps develop around it.

After all, every single Mars mission mentions the possibility of life and water in the history of Mars, so that does seem to be important to us. Yet, there are millions of tons of water ice at the Martian poles, and given the amazing adaptability of life to extreme conditions on Earth, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility for life (of some sort) to exist at the poles of Mars despite the absence of water in liquid phase.

It's worth noting that liquid water isn't needed *permanently* for life to survive, but only occasionally for certain processes to proceed. There's not much water in space after all, yet some fairly high-level organisms manage to survive the hard vacuum for extended periods of time. Life seems to be amazingly resilient when needed.

But a polar Mars mission designed to survive and operate throughout the winter would need atomic power, and that's the big problem. Are we likely to see public anti-nuclear sentiment loosen up a little anytime in the next 20 years, to allow a series of such probes to be built and launched?

The Irony of ARP 147 and Alton Arp and the Hubble

[quanta]

Just look up the Wiki on Alton Harp.

And they took the 1st photo from the "repaired" Hubble and it's an ARP galaxy???

BWAHAHAHAHA!

Re:The Irony of ARP 147 and Alton Arp and the Hubb

[quanta]

Uh, actually his name is Halton Arp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp

Re:Let's hope

[f1vlad]

Thanks for enlightening us you apparent genius.