Hubble's main camera badly crippled

[Thetaloops]

Sorry to say this wonderful instrument is on the blink again. Why has our space programs been so neglected? In the 50's and 60's we thought we would be living in space by now. Let's make more war that'll make a better future.

Hubble's main camera badly crippled
NASA says some science capabilities are likely lost for good



NASA says the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys is on the blink for the third time in the past year.





Updated: 10:03 p.m. ET Jan 29, 2007
The Hubble Space Telescope’s primary camera is offline, with some science capabilities likely lost for good, NASA officials said Monday.

An electrical short in the backup system for Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, or ACS, pushed the orbiting telescope into a protective “safe mode” over the weekend and prompted the formation of an Anomaly Investigation Board on Monday, NASA officials said.

The incident, the third since last June to hobble Hubble's ACS, occurred at 7:34 a.m. ET Saturday. By Sunday, engineers managed to switch the space telescope back to normal operations, with the exception of the ACS, and they hope to resume science observations with the observatory’s remaining instruments later this week.

NASA's investigation board is to study the latest malfunction and present its results by March 2.

“Obviously, we are very disappointed by this latest event because of the popularity of the ACS instrument with astronomers,” Preston Burch, Hubble program manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told reporters Monday during a teleconference.

It was the Advanced Camera for Survey's wide-field channel, for example, that allowed astronomers to generate Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field — the deepest view into the universe to date. But that channel, plus a high-resolution channel used to study stars surrounded by planet-forming material, are likely lost because the latest glitch has cut off power to their systems, Hubble managers said.

“We’re not optimistic at all that those will be restored,” said David Leckrone, NASA’s senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope at Goddard. “The saving grace here is that we have a superb new wide-field camera coming along that was originally designed, in fact, to be a backup for ACS in case ACS failed. It was designed to work in tandem with ACS if [it] was fully alive.”

That new camera — known as Wide Field Camera 3 — is due to be installed at Hubble during NASA’s last space shuttle flight to the observatory, in September 2008.

Hubble engineers hope they will be able to reactivate the ACS' third channel — the solar blind channel used recently to study auroras on Jupiter and Saturn — by February to aid NASA’s New Horizons mission, which is due to make a close flyby of Jupiter on Feb. 28.

“As soon as we’re confident that everyone has done their homework on that, we could very have the solar blind operating by the end of February,” Burch said. “That would be the hope.”

Hubble’s other instruments — the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, the Near Infrared Camera Multi-Object Spectrograph and the Fine Guidance Sensors — are unaffected by the Advanced Camera for Survey's recent glitch.

Hubble’s camera troubles
The ACS has been working on its backup, or Side B, system since the instrument’s primary Side A electronics package encountered a malfunction in June 2006. In September, an electronic hiccup again knocked the camera offline, but the system recovered a short time later.

NASA's Hubble managers said the most recent glitch is not connected to the earlier problems. “It’s very different,” Burch said, adding that the current anomaly’s signature is very different from those seen last year.

Hubble managers had prepared about six observation surveys that would not require the ACS, just in case the finicky instrument went offline. Those research projects will now be implemented while the camera is unavailable.

The ACS anomaly came just two months before the instrument’s projected five-year warranty expired, Hubble managers said. Spacewalking astronauts installed the camera on March 7, 2002, during NASA’s STS-109 mission aboard the Columbia orbiter. Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has been billed as one of the most valuable astronomical instruments of all time and is the product of a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency.

“It’s certainly been an astounding success as an instrument,” said Rick Howard, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The camera met about all of its initial science objectives before its recent failure, he said.

Repair may not be an option
Because of the camera’s hard-to-reach location on Hubble and the already-packed five-spacewalk schedule for next year's final servicing mission to Hubble, adding a new and complicated repair job to the spaceflight is not an attractive option, Burch said.

“Servicing Mission 4 is a very full mission with installing new batteries and gyroscopes, installing one of the fine guidance sensors and two new instruments,” Burch said. He noted that NASA had planned no ACS-related additions during the upcoming Hubble overhaul.

Leckrone said that the new instruments to be grafted into Hubble next year will almost completely restore the telescope’s lost ACS abilities, though the new Wide Field Camera 3 will take longer to generate its predecessor’s stunning views of the universe.

“The successful completion of SM-4 and insertion of Wide Field Camera 3 will take us fully back to not only where we are now, but where we want [Hubble] to be in the future,” Leckrone said.

© 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

[kola]

I am quite skeptical about Earth/space etc.

It the Earth really round? Yeah, I know I'm nuts..

I have always wondered if the Earth appears to be the way it is presented to me/us why do humans/creatures always remain flat on earth when we should be walking upside down as we go towards the south and only be upright if standing on the North Pole.

Can man really survive passing through the radiation belt in a tincan craft?

Did we REALLY land on the moon? I have seen some intereting presentations that the moon landing was bogus.

Most things we know and accept as TRUTH have been presented to us since we entered school. Most of us believe everything we are told.

How many times has something been presented by the so-called experts yet later was false and then corrected with the "supposed" new and accurate information. Hmm.

Can you go back and think of something you learned in school, accepted it as truth, yet later found out it was false?

Kola

[thinkagain]

First, the essence of science is that hypothesis and theories must be supported by empirical evidence. Unfortunately some of this evidence is either proprietory, or its significance can only be appreciated after working many years in the field - so scepticism is reasonable (indeed the essence of science is intelligent scepticism). As far as the earth is concerned - there is overwhelming direct evidence that the world is round ( or at least close to round, certianly not flat), the most important being data from space, but if you don't like that, travel by airplane is highly dependent on the reality of a round earth. So, is the regularity of the seasons, as well as the passage of night and day around the surface of the earth. With respect to walking on the earth, the essential feature is the force of gravity which is similar anyway on the surface and would explain why we do not fall off as we wonder the earth, as well as experiencing always being upright as we walk.

However, before you attempt to deconstruct our current perception of earth and space, consider this - are you willing to live your life and make all your decisions based on something else being true? We are very dependent on the natural regularities that science has discovered for much of our lifestyle. So, the ultimate question isn't whether the theories about earth and space are true, its whether they are useful, and what constitutes usefullness. And that means considering the implications of rejecting the predictive and managerial powers of understanding the cosmos as modern science currently does.
Questioning whether we actually landed on the moon is one thing (our not landing on the moon doesn't change earth's natural tendencies), it is quite another to doubt that the earth is round (which deeply impacts on earth's natural tendencies).

[kola]

good post and thanks.

I understand that gravity is what keeps up planted on Earth but what is involved which compensates us so we do not feel as if we are sideways or upside down. We do not sense the rotation of the Earth nor do we feel the speed at which it accelerates though the Universe. What laws governs all living things on earth to feel upright?

Kola

[thinkagain]

You are delving into issues of relativity and curved space. Since the center of gravity is the point where everyone on the surface feels physically drawn toward, down is all in the same direction - the center of the earth. I like to use the following exercise in workshops to make the point. I ask everyone to stand up looking in the direction of the wall behind me. Now, I walk to the middle of the room and give them the direction to look toward me ... and to notice how they move to fulfill that direction. Some must turn right , some left - yet they are all attempting to see the same thing. Whenever we move our relationship to the center of attraction also changes. The same principle holds for much of life, two different people may want to get to the same place, yet may have to take very different paths to ge there.

That we do not feel the motion of the earth is in part due to the fact that we are moving along almost exactly with the earth, and that we tend to only be conscious of discrepencies of motion. Relative to the earth we are hardly moving at all.

[kola]

very cool..thanks!