newscientistspace.com — Doom and gloom for hubble fans? The Advanced Camera for Surveys is out of action with a power supply problem. NASA will spend the next week diagnosing the problem. The good news is that remain confident the camera can be fixed.
Jun 22, 2006 View in Crawl 4
kraussmJun 23, 2006
probably more like a,well, there are no US camera makers anymore are there, maybe there's a reason for that.
endgameJun 23, 2006
Isn't the Hubble like WAY out there in space. How NASA fixes this stuff remotely is beyond me it's pretty crazy. Best of luck to them though.
danielwsmitheeJun 23, 2006
Ball Aerospace simply fixed the camera. It was originally built by a company called Perkin-Elmer. Once it was in orbit they discovered a serious flaw. NASA issued a request for proposals to fix it. Ball-Aerospace came up with an ingenuous idea to fix the thing. Essentially they gave it glasses.They were also tasked as part of the team to service and later deorbit the Hubble, but when all the shuttle problems occurred that program was canceled.
danielwsmitheeJun 23, 2006
They don't fix it. They have redundancy built into the design. It has two power supplies, the first one failed, now they must switch to the second power supply. They just send a signal to switch a relay.
thekijJun 23, 2006
This is silly. Why don't they build a jet pack that can move the Hubble over to the International Space Station. Then they could fix it easier and take parts for it on the supply ships for the station and won't require separate missions all the time. Doesn't it make more sense to have a "space city" with all your important stuff in one spot? Isn't that the whole point of the ISS?
wvdavisJun 23, 2006
Sounds like they have issue under control. To bad they are going to let it die anyway.<a class="user" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/12/60minutes/main605748.shtml">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/12/60minutes/main605748.shtml</a>
goettelJun 23, 2006
Hubble, although in no way "one of the greatest human achievements", does a lot for the public. That's "public" as in "public funding". Space research in the broadest sense needs many more of these projects, which combine scientific research with a firing of the public's imagination; in this case: pretty pictures.Hubble has been tremendously succesful, but its usefulness is slowly but surely coming to an end. That hasn't been news for years.
manhighJun 23, 2006
ISS is inclined at 51 degrees, because thats the lowest inclination the Russians could get to. The US typically puts things at 28.5 because we can get a lot more payload there (earths rotation helps). I'd venture to guess what you propose could be done, but you cant just strap a rocket onto a very sensitive scientific instrument and not expect to break it.
subcomandanteJun 25, 2006
*tear*