NASA Revives Main Hubble Telescope Camera

antikarma writes "NASA engineers successfully activated the Advanced Camera for Surveys at 9:12 a.m. EDT Friday aboard the agency's Hubble Space Telescope. Checkout was completed at 10:20 a.m. EDT with science observations scheduled to resume Sunday, July 2. 'This is the best possible news,' said Ed Ruitberg, deputy associate director for the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 'We were confident we could work through the camera issue, and now we can get back to doing more incredible science with the camera.'"

Hubble is a joint project by NASA and ESA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not all American.

Re:Hubble is a joint project by NASA and ESA

[HarveyTheWonderBug]

From :

NASA is ESA's partner for the HST. ESA has a nominal 15% stake in the mission and has, among other things, provided the Faint Object Camera, the first two solar panels that powered the spacecraft and a team of space scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, United States. Astronomers employed by ESA and the European Southern Observatory at the Space Telescope-European Coordinating Facility work with various aspects of HST in Munich, Germany, including the calibration of HST's instruments and public outreach. Europe's contribution to HST entitles European astronomers to 15% of the telescope's observing time.

Re:Hubble

[Firethorn]

It was actually 1.5 billion, and 100 million is a low ball figure for the cost of a shuttle launch. [nasa.gov]

Being a purely politically funded venture, nailing down the cost is difficult, but varies.

$300 million [futron.com]
$600 million [spaceprojects.com]
$500 million [worldspaceflight.com]
$55 million incremental, $1.3 billion when you include facilities, research, engineering, etc... [worldspaceflight.com]

If you take a rough midpoint and say $500 million per maintenance, the break even point would be three missions. Now, a huge portion of a satellite's cost is the R&D just to design the thing. If you produce multiple ones, the cost drops substantially. Produce multiple hubbles and soon they'd cost under a billion each. Meanwhile you can still do a great deal of updating on the ground.

I'll admit that I'd prefer to scrap the shuttle entirely, replacing it with boosters, dedicated personal carriers, and source maintenance missions from a space station. This would hopefully drastically reduce the cost of maintaining it, and might change the equations again.

ACS not repaired; revived using the backup mode

[helioquake]

The Hubble's ACS is not repaired; they made the decision that it would not harm the rest of the instrument by activating the backup electronic controller (Side 2).

Historically speaking this marks the half-life time of the mission. It has operated for four years; I expect it to work 3 to 5 more years now.

I don't know if the controllers (Sides 1 and 2) are identical; it wasn't for the STIS and they need to run a series of re-calibration before resuming its science operations. I hope that isn't the case here. I'm supposed to use that camera this month and next.