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Hubble Repairs Declared "Complete Success"
Matt G writes "The Hubble Telescope's brain transplant seems to have been a perfect succss - British-born Michael Foale and Swiss Claude Nicollier carried out the delicate operation of installing a new computer as they flew over Australia at an altitude of about 600km (360 miles) on Thursday.
The full story is posted at The BBC News site here. "
Does anybody know what operating system (if any) runs the new 'brain' ? Is it VxWorks like pathfinder, or maybe just a very thin blanket over the hardware (just enough to get C code working or something) ?
Actually, why was it needed to upgrade the cpus? I mean, I thought hubble's cpu doesn't do more than controlling movements and handling communication protocols so it can send pictures. The new 'brain' will be 20 times faster, but what's the point? Does the telescope perform calculations on-site ? Just wondering.
The Hubble Repair mission should remind us of what, sadly, has been somewhat forgotten as of late:
These guys know their stuff.
When I sysadmin a machine I'm standing next to...I'm standing on something. I'm not floating in nothingness, hoping my toolkits don't float away into the emptiness of space, trying not to bend a couple hundred gold pins while wearing massive mittens and a spacesuit that I have to continually check for tears.
I also don't generally do it for eight hours straight without so much as a water break.
Similarly, when I'm admining a system remotely, I'm not piggybacking on top of a defense network that I can lose access to at any moment, nor am I trying to fit modern computational systems into a space-hardened antiquated piece of hardware. These are some crazy skilled coders, and they deserve much more respect than the budget-forced unit conversion fiasco implied. (We should be ashamed for the reaction! These )
I'm proud of NASA, and I'm proud of the engineer-athlete-scientists who made the Hubble space telescope possible. Thank you. Your work is appreciated.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I would like to be the first to congratulate the people at NASA for doing a fine, fine job.
The hubble telescope is a big focus for the public's attention. With the recent, uhm, mistakes at NASA, I'm sure that alot of managers were sweating about the PR disaster if this would have gone anything but perfectly.
I can see the headlines now:
"NASA fails again!"
"Hubble goes back to sleep"
"Public faith in NASA shaken"
"NASA's funding cut for continued blunders"
"NASA shuts down for restructure"
20 years later
"Anybody remember when we went to the moon?"
Perhaps I'm being a tad melodramatic here, but who else had that queasy feeling that hubble wasn't going to go back online.. ever?
Once again, congrats to all involved, and good luck in all future endeavours.
Rami James
Israel
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rJames.org - illustration
When originally planned in 1979, the Large Space Telescope program called for return to Earth, refurbishment, and relaunch every 5 years, with on-orbit servicing every 2.5 years. Hardware lifetime and reliability requirements were based on that 2.5-year interval between servicing missions. In 1985, contamination and structural loading concerns associated with return to Earth aboard the shuttle eliminated the concept of ground return from the program. NASA decided that on-orbit servicing might be adequate to maintain HST for its 15- year design life. A three year cycle of on-orbit servicing was adopted. The two HST servicing missions in December 1993 and February 1997 were enormous successes. Future servicing missions are tentatively planned for mid-1999 and mid-2002. Contingency flights could still be added to the shuttle manifest to perform specific tasks that cannot wait for the next regularly scheduled servicing mission (and/or required tasks that were not completed on a given servicing mission).
Notice how the media's not making a big deal out of this. I suppose you could argue that successes just don't sell as many newspapers as failures. I think, however, that the mass media likes to manufacture issues by hyping up failures like the Mars mission and then making another story out of the public stir they create. Think about it; "NASA Mars Probe Lost" is just one story, but "Second NASA Failure This Year Causes Public Doubt About Future of Space Agency" can be a snowballing event -- shorts, 'talkback' segments, polls, comments from pundits, etc.
After all, when you're on 24 hours a day, you can't be expected to fill the time by just reporting what really happened when, where and why. That'd require too much actual reporting.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
There's no way the HST has enough resolving power to find something so small. Especially with Mars now well past opposition. A better idea is to use the Mars Orbiter to try to find it, which I believe they are doing. But even that is a long shot.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
More wallpaper for me!
Seriously, even if you don't appreciate the scientific level of what NASA is doing. You can get some really awsome images from them. Check out NASA's awsome collection of images, which have aver generous copying policy.
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There is a design freeze built into almost every program, but it is not, repeat not, based on anything as inane (or prescient) as a five-years-before-launch timeline. For example, the faster-better-cheaper probes don't necessarily even take that long from project approval to launch! The Confirmation Design Review of MPL was barely two years prior to launch. (Read into that what you will.)
The reason for using a 486 instead of a Pentium can be as simple as power and cooling requirements, or as complex as the issue of running a custom RTOS written in C versus running an off-the-shelf Windoe Manager written in C++ and something else godawful. (Or maybe that's the simple decision.)
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
how does NASA spell success after two complete failures with the mars probes?
The Hubble team is an entirely separate team from the Mars probes. One team had a success. Two Mars teams had failures.
Anyway it's not like they haven't messed up on the hubble project before.
True dat. But the embarrassment over the Hubble optics could have been handled much better; they dug their own grave there.
We need to hurry up and privatize NASA befor ethey thow away any more tax dollars.
So what business, exactly, is going to spend money on a Mars probe? Just asking.
The MPL mission was about as privatized as a government program gets: the whole probe was designed and built by outside contractors to a NASA spec. Really, this is the way things should be done. MPL was a failure within aceptable risk. MCO was a horrible avoidable failure, but it's possible that the govt-contractor relationship was partly to blame. This isn't easy.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}