Category: Hubble

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The procedure to begin “brain surgery” on the Hubble Space Telescope will begin at 6:00 am EDT (10:00 GMT) on October 15. The venerable space telescope will be put into electronic hibernation; then engineering teams will work from the ground around the clock for two days to reconfigure a data handler system which failed two weeks ago. If the procedure is successful, science operations could resume as early as Friday, October 17. The Control Unit/Science Data Formatter, which relays science data to Earth, is a redundant system, with two sides. Side A has been used exclusively since the telescope’s launch over 18 years ago in 1990. Side B hasn’t been powered on since well before launch. “It is obviously a possibility that things will not come up,” said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management office at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We have very good confidence this will work. In addition, we have contingency plans built in at each step of the transition where if something does not go the way we expect it to, we’ll be able to back out and go down an alternate path.”

Whipple said there is very little aging that goes on with an unpowered component in space. “It’s actually a very benign storage environment,” he said.

In addition six associated components have to be switched over to a redundant side as well. “Five of the six redundant components in this data management system that will be brought on line have also not been powered since 1990,” said Whipple. “The command procedures to accomplish this transition have been thoroughly tested.”

Engineers and mission managers have been working the past two weeks, devising a plan and testing procedures. NASA headquarters gave approval for the activation on Tuesday.

The planned Hubble Servicing Mission 4, shuttle mission STS-125, would have launched today (Oct. 14) if the data handler had not gone off line. NASA has re-set a tentative launch date for mid-February. The seven member crew, commanded by veteran Scott Altman, will perform five back-to-back spacewalks to add new cameras, (the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph), replace old batteries and gyroscopes, add docking equipment and upgrade the telescope’s guidance system. The astronauts will also attempt to fix the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Those two were never designed to be repaired in orbit. In addition, a spare data handler system will brought up, after engineers test and certify the unit. That unit has not been turned on since 1992.

It has yet to be determined if the spare data handler will be ready by mid-February, and if the astronauts can be trained ready for the additional work required for the unit switch-out.

“We think in the first week or two in November we will have a much better handle on the actual state of the hardware,” Whipple said. “The paperwork says February should be supportable, but we should have much higher confidence (in November).”

Sources: NASA press release, NASA news conference

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Here’s another anniversary for you and more fodder to either ease or add to your Hubble “angst”: Ten years ago, the Hubble Heritage Project began. What is Hubble Heritage? After the Hubble Space Telescope was fixed of its spherical aberration problem in December of 1993, HST started churning out incredible images. After a few years, the images started to pile up, and the astronomers working with Hubble wanted to share them with the public. So with the Hubble Heritage Project, each month, some of the most breathtaking and attractive images are released and showcased to the public. Along with the images, the astronomers explain the science behind the images, as well. Over the past ten years of doing this, the Heritage team has presented to the public aesthetic images that present the universe from an artistic perspective. Its science as art, and these images are some of the most gorgeous “real” art available anywhere. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project, above is the latest release. So while we await the fate of Hubble, enjoy this latest release!

This month’s three-dimensional-looking Hubble image shows the edge of the giant gaseous cavity within the star-forming region called NGC 3324. The glowing nebula has been carved out by intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from several hot, young stars. A cluster of extremely massive stars, located well outside this image in the center of the nebula, is responsible for the ionization of the nebula and excavation of the cavity.

The image also reveals dramatic dark towers of cool gas and dust that rise above the glowing wall of gas. The dense gas at the top resists the blistering ultraviolet radiation from the central stars, and creates a tower that points in the direction of the energy flow. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot young stars in NGC 3324 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away.

This image is a composite of data taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).

The Hubble Heritage Project, which began in October 1998, has released nearly 130 images mined from the Hubble data archive as well as a number of observations taken specifically for the project.

Source: Hubble Heritage , HubbleSite

A major failure on the Hubble Space Telescope has shut down science operations, as the spacecraft is unable to send any data to Earth, according to an article on NASA Spaceflight.com. The failure is on the “Side A” control system. There is also a back-up system, Side B which has never been used. Attempts will be made to switch to Side B later this week. This switch has never been attempted during the lifetime of the telescope, but it is hoped that the switch will work, allowing the HST to return to functionality. This may have an impact on the STS-125’s mission to repair the Hubble, delaying it to 2009, if managers decide to send up a replacement unit, or if a mitigation plan fails to restore the Telescope’s functionality.

Update: NASA held a news conference this afternoon, and said the servicing mission — which was going to launch on Oct. 14 — is definitely on hold. They will attempt to turn on Side B later this week, and depending on how that goes, they are working on a plan to have the shuttle servicing mission bring up and install a spare Science Instrument Command and Data Handling System sometime in 2009. Phil has the dicey details over at Bad Astronomy

Information obtained by NASA Spaceflight.com reads as follows:

“Side A of the CUSDF (Control Unit/Science Data Formatter) in HST went into safe hold, this means science operations have stopped. The spacecraft is still operational but unable to operate the instruments,” noted information acquired by L2.

“Attempts to recover the A side have failed so the project is now working to transfer science operations to the B side, this requires transferring the whole spacecraft from Side A to Side B so its a significant operation.

“Side B side has not been operated on orbit, for HST’s entire on orbit service life it has operated on Side A. However, the B side was fully tested before launch.

“The plan as of now is to complete the transfer to the B side later this week. The details for this will be provided later by the project.

“If the B side comes up fine we could still launch on time so I propose that we do not postpone the (Agency) FRR (Flight Readiness Review) at this time.

“If the B side does not come on line then we clearly have no mission as there is no way to get science data down. ”

“Options are in work. Earlier we had a plan to launch STS-126 first in November and follow up with HST in Feb. with the Feb. 2009 flight as back-up,” says a memo obtained by NASA Spaceflight.com

Stay tuned.

Source: NASA Spaceflight com

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A cooling system for the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) science instrument aboard the Hubble telescope experienced an anomaly during a restart, causing the instrument to go into safe mode. After a couple of additional restarts, the problem still persists, and a decision was made for NICMOS to “stand down” while engineers study the anomaly and allow the cooling system to warm up, which may take a couple of weeks. In the short term, this will affect planned science observations, and engineers are hoping to avoid any long term complications. At this point, if the problem cannot be fixed from the ground, it is unclear how it might affect the upcoming servicing mission, scheduled for an Oct. 10 launch.

New software was uploaded last week to the computer that controls Hubble’s five science instruments to get the telescope ready for the upcoming servicing mission (SM4). Installation of the software requires putting all of the telescope’s science instruments into safe mode configuration for a short period of time.

About six hours after the system was reactivated, at about 4 a.m. EDT on Sept. 11, the NICMOS anomaly was seen. The cooling system put itself into safe mode after seeing too high a speed in the circulator pump operation. After studying data, flight controllers modified operating protection parameters and attempted a restart of the system on Sunday, Sept. 14. The circulator system again indicated a high speed violation so the system was returned to safe mode.

Engineers believe the ice particles in the cooling loop could be causing the problem. With some small adjustments in start-up procedures, engineers think the cooling system can be successfully reactivated. The flight team tried another restart Monday evening (9/15). The anomaly was still seen after that restart, so the Hubble Project’s plan now is to stand down from any additional attempts to restart. Engineers will study the anomaly while waiting until the cooling system has been allowed to warm somewhat, which may take several weeks.

The impact to planned NICMOS science operations involves approximately 70 exposures from three guest observer programs and additional exposures from two NICMOS internal calibration programs. Additionally, all NICMOS science has been removed from this week’s observation schedule. Sixty-one orbits of NICMOS science were scheduled for the week between September 15 and September 21.

The servicing mission already has a jam-packed schedule, and its uncertain if any last minute additions to the mission would be possible.

Source: NASA

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This morning at 7:42 EDT, the Hubble Space Telescope completed it’s 100,000th orbit around the Earth. That’s about 4.38 billion kilometers (2.72 billion miles), as it clicks along at 8 km per second (5 miles/s), orbiting Earth once every 90 minutes. Hubble’s been in orbit for over 18 years now, since its launch on the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. To commemorate occasion, scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., released a special image taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 of a nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper, left) , showing a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal. And soon, Hubble will have a little renewal of its own, with the upcoming fifth and final servicing mission in October.

In preparation for the STS-125 servicing mission to Hubble, on Friday engineers mated the external tank (ET-127) to the two solid rocket boosters. Things are going well with getting Atlantis ready to go, and NASA is looking at actually moving up the launch date for the mission a few days, from the currently scheduled October 8 to October 2. Read more about the mission here, and interviews with the seven astronauts who will be part of the mission are available to read on that page, or you can watch them on NASA TV this week.

The above image released today shows a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies. This representative color image was taken just yesterday on August 10, 2008. Red shows emission from sulfur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen.

Hubble remains in orbit without any fuel; it just uses its speed and Earth’s gravity to maintain its circular orbit, and gyroscopes to maintain the correct attitude. The astronauts on Atlantis will make one final mechanic’s check to replace worn gyroscopes, batteries and a fine guidance sensor and to install new instruments to extend Hubble’s vision. These include a new Wide Field Camera 3 and a Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to observe the light put out by extremely faint, far-away quasars.

Hubble has been an incredible spacecraft that has changed our view of the universe. Happy 100,000th orbit Hubble!

Source: Hubblesite