Oh, they have dragged it out a couple of times (but not for verification but to test various procedures before uplinking commands to live flight hardware.) It gets worse: on such occasions, it was noted that faults occurred with the flight spare during such operations...

Repair won't be easy: you're dealing with a box full of long-obsolete ICs. Perhaps with unlimited time and resources, they could have taken the modern approach of an all-software data handling system running on general-purpose hardware, just in case HST did not live up to its original design life of 15 years.

HST has numerous CCDs in its instruments. I suppose you're referring to WF/PC-1? It was really a set of 8 CCDs (4 per plane) with a resolution of 800x800 pixels each.

Here's a list of the detectors currently onboard:

There was mention of MRO in a recent Oppy update (below), so that is perhaps what they are planning to do.

How many monitors would you be allowed to bring along to your desert island?

Yup, there's a team led by Peter Jenniskens (who regularly does this during meteor showers) going up.

More details here:

http://atv.seti.org/

Ulysses finds that the solar wind pressure and magnetic field strength is 20% lower than the previous solar cycle, and the lowest since such measurements began.

Implications are that Voyager 1 and 2 could reach the heliopause sooner than predicted, if this trend continues.

Don't fret, a new sunspot just appeared today.

Spectrally, brown dwarfs appear to have similar composition to Jupiter (and even similar weather activity!) Bear in mind that the early solar nebula disk was 99% H and He compared to the heavy elements -- if the Sun had driven-off the H and He, you would not be able to build a Jupiter, which also shares the same H/He ratio as the Sun.

If this is a binary system, it would be remarkable, as star-formation simulations are unable to produce systems with such extreme mass ratios.

People can lose their Facebook account for the dumbest of reasons. A friend of mine lost over 150 friends in a recent Facebook crackdown. Their crime against humanity? They had an image of a dog as their profile picture...

Yes, the authors state: "...the spectrum of the companion confirms that it is very cool, showing important water vapor absorption on either sides of the H and K bands and strong CO band heads beyond 2.29 µm."

There are 82 stars nearby, but they estimate that the chances of an interloper are 1-in-30,000. Nevertheless, we really need follow-up proper motion studies to verify that this planet is truly bound to the star.

The color accuracy of the latest SPVA-based panels are pretty decent, but they still have the drawback of high black levels, so I stick with CRTs. Choosing a monitor is a highly subjective thing; best to try to see the display in person before buying...

The laser frequency comb was recently successfully tested at the VTT:

http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-r...8/pr-26-08.html

This is needed to build the next generation of spectrographs to enable detection of Earth-like planets, dark energy etc. The required accuracy really is quite astonishing:

If we ever develop the technology to accelerate a spacecraft to 0.1c, one would hope we would also be able to slow-down from 0.1c at the other end. Seems a waste to take all that time/resources reaching the target star system, to then just flyby at high velocity. You'd want to take fields and particles instruments along, to do science that cannot be done from Earth.

I never posted in that forum, but found it to be very useful in keeping up-to-date with the latest happenings in that area, so sad to see it go, too. With all the amazing things happening in the Solar System and the Universe, why anyone would burn their time discussing politics is beyond me...

A resolution of 20 milliarcsecs?! No wonder the project failed -- their expectations were set a little too high.

I recall reading in Science (or similar rag) that a team from JPL originally found 100,000 microbes per sq/m just a few months before launch, and thus requested a more aggressive sterilization program.

Yesterday, I spent three very pleasant hours walking eight dogs (and got paid for it!), and read a science paper on dark matter and 22 pages of the Cassini ISS handbook on my palmtop during the outing. Does that qualify me as a UMSFer?

Observations of MACS J0025 supports findings of the Bullet Cluster, suggesting dark matter is collisionless:

http://hubblesite.org/news/2008/32/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/macs/

The paper linked from Hubblesite dismisses MOND as being unable to explain the strong lensing effects and only limited success with explaining the weak lensing.

No need to cool the camera, as cosmic ray hits are very obvious -- they leave bright pixels or trails on the image, given a long-enough exposure.

Please accept a rain check from me; I'd very much like to join y'all, but with the equipment at my disposal, the best I could do would be a 720x576 screengrab from my S-VHS video camera -- not "reasonable quality" by today's standards. Be sure to give my best to Oppy.

Latest Dawn update:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journal_8_24_08.asp

NASA announces new name for GLAST: Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/ne...ings_media.html

It isn't necessary for a science team to get their story straight before publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals. In fact, it is quite common for authors to speculate on the wide range of possibilities presented by the data. For example, in a paper that I recently read on extrasolar planets, the authors described their observations, and then went on to speculate (educated guesses based on the observed phenomena) as to whether the planet has an intrinsic or induced magnetic field (or perhaps none at all!) in order to explain the data. After 16 pages, they essentially said they weren't sure what the heck was going on and needed more data...

Stu, you owe me a new swear jar! Awesome stuff!