Hubble trouble..., Serious problems with HST Options

[Jyril]

The press release left out the STIS, which is still functioning...

STIS is very much dead, has been since 2004.

[NMRguy]

John Spencer has another excellent glog entry, this one relating to Hubble.

John,

That’s quite an exciting ride you recount with the Hubble. ACS is out, but WFPC2 is still trucking, and now you even have more time. Hats off to you and your team for buckling down to meet the incredibly sudden deadline!

I was curious about the magnitude of new time that your team picked up and how well it’s spaced out. Best I can tell, one full orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope around the Earth is just over 1.5 hours. Of course, half of that time is also not usable for planetary science because Hubble moves behind Earth relative to its target.

Twenty new orbits give you an upper limit of 16 hours of undivided time, not taking into account atmosphere interference when rounding the limb, unusable observation periods like that over the South Atlantic Anomaly, etc. That’s a lot of time with HST, but you would burn through the entire set in 32 hours if they were taken consecutively!

So could you put this “gift” into perspective for us? [The HST Weekly Timetable Reports are not so great for search queries.] How many orbits were you able to get originally with ACS through the competitive grant process? And over what time period are you able to use this new observation time?

Good luck!