Hubble's Key Camera Stops Working

[yevaud]

<b>Hubble's key camera stops working</b><br /><br /> * 17:54 22 June 2006<br /> * NewScientist.com news service<br /> * Maggie McKee<br /><br /><i>The Hubble Space Telescope's workhorse instrument – the Advanced Camera for Surveys – has stopped working. NASA will spend the next week diagnosing the problem, but mission managers say they are confident the camera will be fixed shortly thereafter.<br /><br />The camera constantly beams down signals of how its subsystems are operating. And on Monday, the signals coming from its low-voltage power supply suddenly went awry.<br /><br />"It was as if the power had failed to that piece of the instrument," says Bruce Margon, at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, US, which manages Hubble's observations. "It got our attention because it's the most heavily used instrument on the spacecraft."<br /><br />Mission managers believe with 90% certainty that the problem is down to a simple part on a circuit board failing earlier than expected. "Most likely, some five-cent resistor or capacitor that's supposed to last for 20 years by bad luck only lasted for six," Margon told New Scientist.<br /><br />If that is the case, the problem should be easy to fix, he says. That is because the camera includes a duplicate low-voltage power supply for just such failures. "If we're correct, we'll just turn on the backup system and it's good as new," he says.</i><br /><br />Full Story <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em>Differential Diagnosis:  </em>"<strong><em>I am both amused and annoyed that you think I should be less stubborn than you are</em></strong>."<br /> </p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Sure glad there's a backup. ACS was slated to do some followup studies on Xena's moon Gabrielle. I think that was slated for September, if I'm not mistaken.<br /><br />What they have done with past component failures was to move projects that require other instruments up in the queue. For instance, a lot of ultraviolet spectroscopy got done when it was discovered that the main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. That was actually a plus, since spectrograms lack dramatic impact for making publicity photos but are very important to understanding stellar evolution, structure, and composition. Ultraviolet spectroscopy can only be done outside of the atmosphere.

 

[pioneer0333]

This cuts the re-sale value in half!!! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Selling Hubble would be like<br />Selling the crown jewels<br />Selling the plutonium<br />Selling the constitution<br />Selling the Nobel Prize<br />Selling Mt. Rushmore<br />Selling the Congressional Medal of Honor<br />Selling out.<br /><img src="/images/icons/frown.gif" />

 

[enigma10]

Oddly, most of those items have been sold for one thing or another at one time in the past. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <em>"<font color="#333399">An organism at war with itself is a doomed organism." - Carl Sagan</font></em> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

The company that <i>makes</i> the Congressional Medal of Honor was caught selling fakes. Really good fakes, can't tell the difference. Two executives got fired and the company had to pay a fine.<br /><br />During WWII, the Nazis came to "collect the gold of the Jews" from two professors. The department head told them that they had disappeared and he hadn't seen them for a while.<br /><br />Sitting on a shelf in his lab were two jars of a liquid labeled with the names of innocuous salts. After the war, the jars were sent to the Nobel institute, the gold from the disolved Prize medals was extracted and the medals were recast and sent to the owners.<br /><br />There are fakes of all kinds, but some things just are not sold.