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.

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: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: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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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...

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.

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: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.

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.