The Hubble telescope is in trouble and NASA is again attempting to fix it.

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[OscarCP]

I learned this today, from a “Nature” newsletter with a link to this “Wired” online article:

https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-tries-to-save-hubble-again/?

Excerpts:

“THE HUBBLE SPACE telescope, one of the most famous telescopes of the 20th and 21st centuries, has faltered once again. After a computer hardware problem arose in late October, NASA engineers put Hubble into a coma, suspending its science operations as they carefully attempt to bring its systems back online.

Engineers managed to revive one of its instruments earlier this week, offering hope that they will end the telescope’s convalescence as they restart its other systems, one at a time. “I think we are on a path to recovery,” says Jim Jeletic, Hubble’s deputy project manager.”

…..

“Hubble’s latest hardware challenges come just a month before its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch into orbit. Like its iconic predecessor, the new telescope will collect troves of spectacular images, though it’s designed to probe wavelengths more in the infrared range, allowing it to penetrate dusty parts of galaxies and stellar nebulae. Riess expects it to be similarly popular with astronomers and with the public.
Hubble has easily surpassed its expected lifespan, and the same goes for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched in 1999 and remains operational, although it was designed to last only five years. This is a good sign for Webb, similarly planned for a five-year lifespan. Unlike Hubble, however, it will orbit much farther away, making it inaccessible to astronauts. That means any problems that arise will have to be fixed remotely.

But Hubble helped set the stage for its successor. For example, after Hubble launched, engineers realized that its mirror wasn’t curved properly, initially resulting in blurry images. Webb’s design allows for engineers to adjust the curvature remotely if an error like that crops up.

Astronomers appreciate the hard work of Hubble’s engineers and operators. “Their dedication to keep on rescuing the telescope from all its fits of pique and changes of mood is fantastic. I’m so proud of them backing the scientists who are using the data,” says Julianne Dalcanton, an astronomer at the University of Washington who has used Hubble frequently throughout her career, including to map Andromeda, our galactic neighbor. She, Kartaltepe, and other astronomers look forward to a time when both Hubble and Webb are in the sky, taking observations together, especially as they’ll learn different things from the telescopes’ respective instruments and wavelength coverage.

While Jeletic and his team don’t yet know when Hubble will be back online, he expects all systems to eventually be up and running once again. “Some day Hubble will die, like every other spacecraft,” he says. “But hopefully that’s still a long ways off.””

Hubble at sunset:

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• This topic was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by OscarCP.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by OscarCP.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by OscarCP.

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TechTango

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Thanks Oscar, I’ve been interested in astronomy since I was a kid.  I got my first telescope when I was nine.  I really hope they can get the HST fixed because it is a great telescope and would work well with the JWST.  I also enjoy seeing things last way past their expected lifespan.  HST has done a great job and produced some of the most fantastic pictures of space ever seen.  I’m hoping that will continue.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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Wavy: ” I also enjoy seeing things last way past their expected lifespan. ”

(As do I, myself being, after all, one of the things of this world.)

As to the the Hubble: it was launched in 1990, so I would imagine that  its computer is likely to be running Windows 3, or earlier,  as Win 3 was first released in the same year. Unless it got one of those software updates sent and installed remotely from Mission Control … What a way to ruin the poetry of a mission!

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Charlie

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Ooops! Charlie, not Wavy! Sorry, sorry, sorry.

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Charlie

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There have been four service missions that helped bring the HST computer up to date.  Here are some of the improvements to the computer according to Wikipedia:

The two initial, primary computers on the HST were the 1.25 MHz DF-224 system, built by Rockwell Autonetics, which contained three redundant CPUs, and two redundant NSSC-1 (NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer, Model 1) systems, developed by Westinghouse and GSFC using diode–transistor logic (DTL). A co-processor for the DF-224 was added during Servicing Mission 1 in 1993, which consisted of two redundant strings of an Intel-based 80386 processor with an 80387 math co-processor. The DF-224 and its 386 co-processor were replaced by a 25 MHz Intel-based 80486 processor system during Servicing Mission 3A in 1999. The new computer is 20 times faster, with six times more memory, than the DF-224 it replaced. It increases throughput by moving some computing tasks from the ground to the spacecraft and saves money by allowing the use of modern programming languages.

Additionally, some of the science instruments and components had their own embedded microprocessor-based control systems. The MATs (Multiple Access Transponder) components, MAT-1 and MAT-2, utilize Hughes Aircraft CDP1802CD microprocessors. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WFPC) also utilized an RCA 1802 microprocessor (or possibly the older 1801 version).

I would hope that by the latest Hubble service mission which was in 2005, it would have upgraded it to Windows XP SP2, if they were even using MS Windows. Nothing much is said about what OS is used.

Being 20 something in the 70's was much more fun than being 70 something in the 20's.

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OscarCP

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I was told this story way back in the 1990s, the first time the Hubble went wrong.

A friend was a member of a syndicate at Lloyds that had insured the Hubble, and was on the line for an eye-watering amount of money if the claim for a total loss hit the market.  The astronauts from the Space Shuttle did something that had never been done, or even attempted, before, and the telescope had its unprecedented repair, leading to decades more of useful life.

My friend was off the hook.  Shortly afterwards, he met a friend from the USA, who was my source for this story, first friend just looked at him, and said with a huge smile and a sigh of relief: “God Bless America”.

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OscarCP

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NASA warns ‘hazardous’ asteroid size of Eiffel Tower is heading towards Earth

Nereus is a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid and impact could be devastating.

NASA’s asteroid monitor predicts it will come close to Earth on December 11.

Impact from the asteroid could be devastating, but thankfully, it does not pose a threat to the planet.

The asteroid will fly by the planet at a distance 3.9 million kilometres – a distance greater than 10 times of that between the Earth and the moon.

Nereus is 330 metres long, which makes it larger than 90% of asteroids, but tiny compared to large asteroids, according to Space Reference…

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Alex, the link you have given takes one to a site that asks that, in order to read what is in there, one first must allow oneself to be spied, tracked and have one’s naked pictures published in Facebook and Instagram — besides this not being about the Hubble.

I strongly advise you to start a thread on this otherwise interesting topic. As a bonus, here are two links you could use to start it that do not present such high potential of instant browsing doom:

The same news, but in a nicer offering:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/hazardous-asteroid-size-eiffel-tower-25399311

And the bad news for this month, directly from the horse’s mouth (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that, as far as I know, is just about anything to do with outer space these days, except jet airplanes, that do not belong in outer space). And when you read it, then you’ll be also afraid, very afraid:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch/next-five-approaches

Doom a coming from on high:

 

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OscarCP wrote:

Alex, the link you have given takes one to a site that asks that, in order to read what is in there, one first must allow oneself to be spied, tracked and have one’s naked pictures published in Facebook and Instagram

Not on my laptop running Chrome.
It maybe only when using Firefox 🙂

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? says:

update, Hubble is still stuck in Safe Mode unfortunately. James Webb Space Telescope is now scheduled to lift of from French Guiana on December 22nd 2021. am looking forward to peering back in time 13.787 +/-  0.020 billion years give or take a few…

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wavy, OscarCP

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anonymous wrote:

update, Hubble is still stuck in Safe Mode unfortunately.

Latest status report appears to say otherwise?

Nov 29, 2021

Three of Hubble’s four active instruments are now collecting science data once again.

NASA Takes Another Step Toward Full Hubble Ops: Spectrograph Returns

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Charlie, OscarCP

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So it is not the whole Hubble, as a spacecraft, that still is in safe mode, but one of its main instruments and, perhaps, some secondary ones, while further attempts are being made to get everything back to working condition, according to the NASA article linked by  b:

“Hubble’s additional instruments have remained in safe mode while NASA takes steps to recover them to operational status. The rest of the telescope is operating as expected.”

A gradual recovery of the temporarily lost functions, resulting from what looks like a computer glitch, is to be expected, as such a thing is always done very, very carefully and the time this takes is not the main consideration.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
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wavy

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Anonymous: Thanks, for the bad news. Here is some more bad news: The James Webb had an accident when it was being strapped to its adapter, the hardware that connects it firmly to the launch rocket and includes the protective fairing meant to prevent it from creating too much air resistance and also from heating and burning thanks to said air resistance when rising through the atmosphere at a speed that eventually becomes much higher than that of sound. What happened is that one of the securing clamps broke, shaking badly this 10 billion piece of hardware that has been under construction for a quarter of a century. So the initial launch was postponed until the telescope had been tested thoroughly looking for possible damage, in order to try to repair any that was found:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/an-incident-with-the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-occurred/

And more about the tricky issue of first launching the James Webb (launch rockets now and then explode or fail to rise properly, so then fall down and crash along with its pricey and priceless payload, … etc.), then sending it far from Earth to the gravitationally stable Lagrange point L2, a million miles behind the Moon (and not loosing it along the way):

( https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html )

So nothing to worry about … until the telescope deploys, that is, unfurls from its packed-for-launch arrangement:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/james-webb-space-telescope-clamp-nasa/620859/

Excerpt (emphasis is mine):

“We need to make sure that when we deploy [once the telescope is in its intended position far behind the Moon] , we don’t accidentally snag on any of [the] sensitive components” on the telescope, Krystal Puga, a spacecraft systems engineer at Northrop Grumman, which led the manufacturing of the observatory, said at the same press conference. The sunshield relies on 140 release mechanisms to unfurl, and each “must work perfectly,” Puga said. “They’re all single-point failures.”

The observatory overall has 344 of these single-point failures, which are as ominous as they sound. About 80 percent of them are involved in the deployment sequence, Menzel said, which is one of the most complex that NASA has ever attempted. “We’ve built it, we’ve aligned it, we’ve tested it, we proved it worked. Now we’re going to have to break it up, fold it up, and actually rebuild it on orbit—rebuild it, realign it, retune it and get it to work robotically on orbit,” Menzel said. “That’s never been done before.” Engineers have, of course, practiced the various deployments over the years, on both small and full-size models.”

And what is Jenga?

 

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
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wavy

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I was hoping this would be a nice xmas present. Still got my digits crossed.

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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