Hubble Camera Shuts Down

Maggie McKee writes "Hubble's main camera is offline again, but the problem does not appear to be with its power supply, like it was this summer. This time, the issue seems to be the electronics on the sharpest of its three camera-like channels, the High Resolution Channel. NASA says the worst-case scenario is that the ACS could lose half the channel's field of view, so it would take longer to observe its targets. If the problems are truly unrelated, it's been an especially unlucky few months for this instrument!"

Re:This time, its the Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've observed the opposite. A large portion of slashdot dislikes the spaceshuttle, regularly saying something along the lines of, "If only we used disposable rockets like we used to, like the Russians, we'd be better off"

Re:This time, its the Americans...

[Yehooti]

Why blame anyone when leading edge technology has a problem? It happens. The Russian's deserve our hats off to them for their dependable rides to the ISS. The US deserves a hat tip for the brilliant images brought to us of space, from space. Though different, it is all high tech and subject to the problems that always happen when we're pushing the envelope. I just don't see how we would blast the Russians anymore than we would blast the US, if the US has a failure in one of their most publicized systems.

cue the shuttle enthusiasts

[grozzie2]

Ok, cue up all the shuttle enthusiasts to pipe in now with the 'drastic need for a hubble service mission'.

When you do though, ask a simple reality check question. With shuttle trips running on the order of a billion dollars these days, what will generate more actual scientific data? Squander those kind of funds on a rocket ride to fix the aging hubble, or, invest half of it in modern ground based observing infrastructure, then take the other half and feed it into the scientific welfare system known as grants over a period of 20 years.

Re:This time, its the Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't leading edge technology. It's 80's technology wearing out long after it's design life. Hubble is old, it is long past the time that we should have launched a new one.

Re:cue the shuttle enthusiasts

[JackieBrown]

Wrong.....

Should read "Unless there are astronauts involved, and unless something terrible may happen to them, you won't get anyone's attention.

Re:This time, its the Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you live in America, you can thank Europe for providing bases, backing your armies up and generally helping out a hell of a lot in WW2. You can also thank Europe for funding the expeditions that got to America in the first place, giving birth to your ancestors, providing the armies that got rid of the native Americans, and giving you a good third, if not half, of scientific advancement over the millennia. And know why the Russians don't have enough money to get to space on their own? Because you ruined their economy by dragging them into a decade-long arms race!

Yes, America gets a lot of flak that it doesn't deserve. But you guys have GOT to stop dragging out the old "if it wasn't for America you'd all be speaking German!" bullshit. Every single goddamn country has contributed to avoiding disasters or to important scientific input, you aren't the only ones. You're just the richest and most complacent at the moment, and even at your best you aren't a patch on the Romans.

Re:How much could we learn?

[undeaf]

Trips to the moon and extraatmospheric telescopes are not neccessarily at odds to each other, if we could put a telescope on the moon, that would also be not be inside an atmosphere, and it wouldn't need gyroscopes to stabilise itself.

Re:cue the shuttle enthusiasts

[Fnkmaster]

While I generally agree with you, the billion dollar figure is an *average* cost per mission, not a marginal cost per mission. On the margin, the incremental mission cost is about $60M dollars. If you "cost" out some smaller fraction of the fixed costs to a marginal shuttle mission added to service Hubble, you might be able to justify saying it "costs" a few hundred million.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program [wikipedia.org].

Anyway, the cost of the Hubble was $1.5B at time of launch (excluding all the operating and maintenance costs since then). If we assume the replacement cost would be about that much (less design cost, but in 2006 dollars it would be costlier - let's figure that's a wash), then another shuttle mission would be well worth it over a replacement Hubble telescope.

Of course the flip side of this is that if you are using Hubble service as the *justification* for running the shuttle program in the first place, then it would be legit to assign all the current fixed costs incurred as part of the Hubble maintenance bill, in which case it probably would just be cheaper to replace the damned thing.

Re:If they decide to fix it

[Orange Crush]

The best bet would be to schedule in a repair stop during one of the space shuttle's remaining 13(?) scheduled space flights to deliver parts to the ISS.

I don't think that would be feasible. The shuttle can't just zip around to multiple different orbital rendezvous over the course of a single mission. I haven't been able to find any info, but I'm doubting very much that Hubble and the ISS are even remotely "on the way" to each other. Not to mention that the shuttle will be using much of its payload capacity to build the station and burning some of its limited orbital-manuevering fuel to correct the ISS's orbit. There's probably not enough room or enough in the tanks. (Hubble needs orbit correction too, as well as new gyroscopes in addition to this recent camera failure--no telling what that'll entail.) Even if they're close in orbital rendezvous terms, the shuttle would still probably have to fly a dedicated mission to fix hubble. Not gonna happen.