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

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!

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.

...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: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.