[X] My Assistant

[stevesliva]

Some more updates coming out today:
http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/081023hubble/

One software patch, one determination (hope?) that the glitch was a one-time event.

[kohare]

NASA's Hubble news site reports "The current primary camera on the Hubble Space Telescope is now back in active operation and will resume science observations shortly" and that Space Telescope Science Institute expect to release an image later this week after calibration.

More details here.

(First post after several months lurking - trust this info on Hubble instruments is OK to post)

[stevesliva]

Fantastic news so far. Now hoping for confirmation that the flight spare SIC&DH box is fully functional.

[tedstryk]

Wow, looks like WFPC/2's days aren't over after all.

[Stu]

Update...

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/...-telescope.html

[nprev]

Oh, great.

This is not a specific criticism, but a general one; I know the reasons for it have to be lack of personnel or money, and hopefully not lack of planning or foresight. I can't understand why this spare was not dragged out of storage periodically (maybe annually) and tested so that any problems could be identified & resolved long before it was needed. "Intermittent" problems are by FAR the most diffiicult to resolve because the symptom does not persist; it's too easy to end up chasing your own tail.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

ESA also published a press report:
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is back in business and HST science operations were resumed on 25 October 2008, four weeks after a problem with the science data formatter took the spacecraft into safe mode.

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMQOV5BXMF_index_0.html

[mcaplinger]

I can't understand why this spare was not dragged out of storage periodically (maybe annually) and tested so that any problems could be identified & resolved long before it was needed.

You answered your own question: this would have cost money. Also, the only thing extra this is costing now is time; if they had identified this 5 years ago it still would have been an intermittent problem and hard to fix.

Frankly I don't know very many astronomers who think HST is worth the money it costs to run any more, not even counting the cost of SM4, but apparently it's "too well-loved" by the public to just let die. You have to admire the STSCI's ability to do PR, if nothing else.

[Del Palmer]

This is not a specific criticism, but a general one; I know the reasons for it have to be lack of personnel or money, and hopefully not lack of planning or foresight. I can't understand why this spare was not dragged out of storage periodically (maybe annually) and tested so that any problems could be identified & resolved long before it was needed.

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.

[nprev]

Thanks, Del.

<sigh>...I get it. I'm a bit slow about logistics issues for small programs like Hubble; used to military aircraft that usually have hundreds of end items to support, so the philosophy's a bit different.

Not seeing a happy ending here, but would be delighted to be proven wrong.

[rdale]

Update...

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/...-telescope.html

FlightGlobal's story is wrong, there is no need to build a new box.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php...27669#msg327669

[stevesliva]

Frankly I don't know very many astronomers who think HST is worth the money it costs to run any more, not even counting the cost of SM4, but apparently it's "too well-loved" by the public to just let die. You have to admire the STSCI's ability to do PR, if nothing else.

If we ignore cost, how much of the observation capability cannot be duplicated by other telescopes? Long exposures in all wavelengths? IR & Near IR?

[tedstryk]

If we ignore cost, how much of the observation capability cannot be duplicated by other telescopes? Long exposures in all wavelengths? IR & Near IR?

Don't forget that it is the only large ultraviolet telescope in operation.

[mcaplinger]

In fairness, it's proven quite difficult to find much objective comparison between HST and ground-based capability; my earlier message was probably a little too hard-over. And like so many things it's probably a false dichotomy anyway, because if HST were shut down tomorrow, it's not like the money would be spent on ground-based telescopes.

The main justification for NGST is in the thermal infrared, measurements that are very hard to make from the ground because of atmospheric emission. NICMOS, so far as I know, has not been very successful for a variety of technical reasons and has probably been mostly supplanted by SIRTF anyway. I'm not sure about the role of UV; people seem to have concluded that with current detector technology it'll be hard to do a lot better than HST for a while.

http://www.stsci.edu/institute/conference/...HSLprogram.html is a good source of information.