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Hubble Repairs Declared "Complete Success"

Posted by Roblimo on from the upgrades-that-work dept.

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. "

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Best Wishes to NASA by Effugas · · Score: 5

    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

  2. HST maintenance by Captain+Zion · · Score: 4
    it's likely that it was mainly just 'preventative maintenance'.. the old CPUs probably already had some damage from the length of time they'd been up there and they needed to be replaced anyway
    From the Space Telescope Science Institute:

    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).

  3. Re:Technical details? by breser · · Score: 3

    According to the mission website the new computer has advanced radition protection. The radiation in space will eventually destroy the computer. They replaced it with a newer computer that was designed to have a longer life span. Additionally the new computer has six times as much memory and three times as much processor speed. The new processor speed and memory will be used to give them more accuracy in the pointing of the spacecraft.