RSSHubble Space Telescope crashes again, and fix may not come until February
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published October 17, 2008, 7:00 PM
The 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope hasn't sent any pictures for the past three weeks, and fixing the system in outer space hasn't exactly gone as smoothly as NASA officials hoped. Restoration of the telescope's operations fot hampered by a couple of unexplained problems -- or "anomalies," in NASA-speak -- earlier this week.
On Wednesday, flight controllers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD started to reinstate data transmsission for the telescope. To work around an inital failure that happened on September 27, the engineers began reconfiguring "six components of the Hubble Data Management System and five components in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SIC &DH) system to use their redundant (or B) sides," says a Hubble status report.
Progress seemed fine until Thursday afternoon, until the two "anomalies" -- maybe related, or maybe not -- struck, one right after the other. First, a low-voltage power supply problem stopped the engineers from rebooting the telescope. Then, less than four hours later, all operations ceased entirely.
"At 1:40 pm, when the low voltage power supply to the ACS Solar Blind Channel was commanded on, software running in a microprocessor in ACS detected an incorrect voltage level in the Solar Blind Channel and suspended ACS," said the report.
"Then at 5:14 pm, the Hubble spacecraft computer sensed the loss of a 'keep alive' signal from the NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer in the SIC&DH and correctly responded by safing the NSSC-I and the science instruments."
At a news conference on Wednesday, officials told reporters that the engineers might be able to get to the bottom of the satellite's glitches as early as the end of next week. NASA has delayed a spaceflight to Hubble that would have involved installing two new instruments and repairing two inactive ones, along with replacement aging components.
That mission has now been delayed until at least February, and if NASA engineers can't get to the bottom of the software problems in the meantime, Hubble may not transmit any additional images until sometime next year.
Just use duck tape...duck tape fixes everything. *wink*
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|I think they should just dismantle it and get it home . they can re release it later after a proper upgrade. It's a waste of taxpayers money to try to fix it in space. It will be lot more expensive to get it back and re launch but I guess after what it has shown us I think it deserves that much.
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|Fixing it in space is actually a valuable exercise by itself. As for fixing it planet-side for re-launch? Dream on...
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|Actually a little known fact, they have 2 hubble telescopes. one sits in a giant bathtub in the goddard space flight center, where astronaughts test everything in before they make the trip. so in essence, they do fix it on the planet-side. they just take it back out and send it up to be fixed in space, which is much easier. My aunt is actually part of the team that designed it and is in charge of keeping it up and running. they used to let you in to tour the facility and see the second hubble, before the whole 9/11 thing anyway...
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|18 years of extreme high temp. and extreme cold temp. of space will do alot of damage to hardware.
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|there gunna upgrade it to andriod :)
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|They were using some ver of Unix I bet, Nasa didn't use windows that far back. And Hubble is old. Iam sure they didn't use windows 3.11...
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|1) need a TLA converter for the story.
2) the specter of a common bus failure looms. story also has not mentioned whether there are any live communications with Hubble. good luck with this one. where I work, there'd be a dispatch with spares of everything set up.
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|I AM curious what base os they are using
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|I guess they are going to blame Microsoft for this? >:)
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|PC_TOOL must have worked on it!
:=0
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|Needs a woman's touch and a hair grip although Brits will probably agree a Blue Peter (BBC children's TV program) presenter should be sent up there with a breakfast cereal box, some tape and a hair grip. LOL
Seriously though, with technology changing at the speed it is, maybe it is time to send the ol' lady into the darkness of space and replace her with something more modern.
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|Well they use glorified Polyfilla when several of the 'heat resistant tiles' fall off after take-off.
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|America, known for R&D and the exploration of the unknown and more in depth of the known, in order to better mankind and promote growth through knowledge... so on and so on... has now failed itself. Truly, this is a sign of the times and if not corrected, we will become a 3rd world country!!! Sad... very sad...
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|Oh come on, Hubble has already surpassed its anticipated life and delivered results beyond imagination. The sad thing is that there's no replacement in sight, instead money is put into the International Space Station, which has taught us little that we did not already know from Mir.
And don't forget the Voyager's are still going, still calling home - but I have to wonder whether we could do that again.
The only reason that Hubble won't get fixed is lack of courage.
But I do wish the US would do something about its finacial systems, their failings are doing far more damage to US prestige than any failings wrt Hubble.
No matter what happens Hubble has to be second only to Apollo 11.
BTW I'm not a US citizen, or an amerigophile. And I think NASA will get it fixed, just like they fixed the camera on one of the Voyager's
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|You realize that while the handy-men (it's a joke, relax...) are sent from US bases all of these space laboratories are operating in international collaboration with many different stake holders, right?
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|i wonder if they tried pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del
or check to see if the power was plugged into the wall outlet ...
i mean come on, that thing is running on a 486
these bricks didnt even need a heatsink ...
or, they're probably waiting for black Friday to buy a good cpu/mobo combo, and considering shipping time to what... outterspace ?? that's about 2 months (if they dont get UPS of course) so yeah, February sounds just about right
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|If I were to venture a guess for the Hubble OS it'd be Microware OS9 or a flavor thereof - 'prolly the same OS9 triple redundant system organization they've been using on the Shuttles all these years.
There's been more bang for the Hubble buck than most of our other programs excepting the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo progression, but it's going to end eventually no matter who would hate to see the end of it.
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