Hubble's Advanced Camera Suspends Operations

helio writes "The Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) went offline on June 19, 2006. The cause is yet undetermined, although engineers suspect that the culprit may be a bad transistor in the ACS's electronic control board or possibly a memory corruption event due to energetic particle bombardment. Since a backup electronic controller is available for service, this incident is not very likely to lead to the end of the Hubble's Advanced Camera in any event. But, before any attempt to reactivate the camera, engineers are cautiously evaluating and isolating the probable cause of this incident in order to avoid any further incident."

Re:Funding

[Firethorn]

Hubble always had a limited life span, and with the loss of two shuttles, we have to look at prioritizing, especially with the requirement for the astronaughts to be able to evacutate to the ISS if the shuttle is unable to land.

Personally, I'd be working more towards launching a replacement for the Hubble. Ground based telescopes have caught up in many ways with adaptive lense technologies, but the hubble works much better in the infrared from what I understand. Design the replacement more towards making up the shortfalls of ground based telescopes.

Given the cost of a dedicated shuttle maintenance mission, it might even be cheaper to just launch new ones, especially if you make a series of them, allowing you to spread R&D costs between multiple sats.

Re:More links

[MustardMan]

So let me get this straight...

The 'editors' at slashdot refuse to correct misspellings, typos, and grossly inaccurate statements.

Put in an informative link, though, and they are ALL ABOUT removing that shit.

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I think you're absolutely right, about the value of manned space exploration, but I also think that right now NASA is dithering; they're not spending enough time and money on either the things that already work (e.g., Hubble) or on things that will only work if we put a ton of effort into them (e.g., a human return to the Moon, and then on to Mars.) Without a massive increase in their budget -- which I'd love to see, but I'm not holding my breath -- the current situation boils down to "jack of all trades, master of none."

And yes, I think the White House is largely responsible for this situation. When Bush first started talking big about manned space flight, I honestly thought that this was the one thing he might do to turn his administration from an unqualified disaster into a major success; long after stupidities like the Iraq war have faded into history, a thriving human presence in space would be a great legacy. But nope, it was just election-year hype. As usual.

Hubble Origins Probe

[bhima]

This would be nearly a non-issue if the powers that be had gotten off their asses and funded and built the Hubble Origins Probe.

This failure is one of many that show that America is loosing the capability of space flight and research.

From their website (http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/):

The Hubble Origins Probe (HOP) is a proposed 2.4 meter free flying space telescope.The HOP concept is to replicate the design of the Hubble Space Telescope with a much lighter unaberrated mirror and optical telescope assembly, enabling a rapid path to launch, significant cost savings and risk mitigation. HOP will fly the instruments originally planned for the 4th HST servicing mission as well as a new very wide field imager, enhancing the original science mission of Hubble.

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[turgid]

No one's proposing that we attempt to breathe the atmosphere on Mars.

It would be an interesting and valuable laerning exercise setting up a semi-independent colony on Mars. We need some nuclear powered rockets first.

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[jani]

Mars is the second most hospitable planet we know, after Earth.

Well, Venus is closer, warmer and with a substantial atmosphere. Granted, it's a hell on traditional materials and space technology, but the atmosphere offers significant protection as well as a plentiful source for oxygen (carbon dioxide). On the downside is the weak magnetic field, but Mars offers nothing in that department either.

It's easier to focus on Mars because the planet has been more thoroughly explored, and the lack of atmosphere means that we can practice on the Moon. We have no similar testing grounds for Venus, except for high pressure equipment used in deep sea exploration and drilling.

I'll also agree that Venus probably is more technically challenging to settle, but a bonus point is that as an inner planet, it has less risk of meteoritic impacts. :)

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[Pometacom]

I'm not sure I understand the logic that "it won't do us good" to study events hundreds or millions of light years away. By the same logic, why would it do us good to study the Moon, the Sun or Mars? They're pretty gosh-darned far away -- especially by boat. Nor do I understand the big jones for a "manned" trip to the moon or Mars (howbout the Sun?). If robots and remote analytical gadgets can gather the same or more scientific data as humans more quickly and at a remote fraction of the cost, why is this not a good thing? Isn't one of the key purposes of technology to take people where they cannot physically go (inside your arteries, for example)? Seems the whole "manned" expedition thing has very little to do with science and is mostly a hubris, nationalism and manifest destiny thing. If manned interplanetary visits were cheap, safe and easy, we would already be doing it. Any manned visit to another celestial body except the moon would eat up all of the $$$ for all other space projects and then some -- while producing far less usable and interesting scientific data. And we've already been to the moon a bunch of times. The holy grail for interplanetary, manned space trips has always been to find other life. Non-manned exploration technologies are now filling that role very well. At best, Mars may support very scant and simple microbial organisms -- or just fossils of them -- and these would most likely exist at depths or locales on Mars well beyond what a first, second or seventh manned exploration could investigate. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter suspected of perhaps (maybe) harboring life have such wacky and inhospitable conditions and are so distant from Earth that manned exploration is pretty much out. So Mars is it in terms of finding and signs of life and we already know that at best we might find a few very simple microbes or fossils of them. Hubble or its replacement already gives us viewing conditions outside the Earth's atmosphere, so there's no crying need for a telescope on the moon that will do the same thing at a much higher initial and ongoing cost (think of the $$$ bill for sending a Hubble repair/upgrade flight to the moon rather than just into Earth orbit). Any other reasons?

Re:Hubble maintenance cancelled.

[obnoxiousbastard]

No one talks about the pictures the Hubble just took, but a man standing on another planet, now that's news!

Ummm... that's just wrong. Do you have any idea how many papers have been written citing Hubble data and how many discoveries it has made!?

There are people talking about Hubble data all the time and will continue to do so long into the future.