Category: hst

It looks good for the Hubble space telescope. According to the NASA web site (quote below), the switch to a backup system looks promising. With that, hubble could operate while the ground folks prepare final repair plans. Repairs are scheduled to be carried out as part of the space shuttle’s hubble servicing missing, which now tenatively has been moved to mid-February (some sources say Feb, 17th 2009).

From the NASA site:

The Hubble Space Telescope team completed switching the required hardware modules to their B-sides about 9:30 a.m. this morning and received telemetry that verified they had good data. Everything at this point looks good.

The 486 computer on Hubble was reloaded with data around noon and successfully performed a data dump back to the ground to verify all the loads were proper. At 1:10 p.m. this afternoon the team brought Hubble out of safe mode and placed the 486 computer back in control. Late this afternoon, Gyro #4 (which was needed for safe mode) will be turned off.

The team will reconfigure Side B of the Science Instrument Command & Data Handling (SIC&DH) computer later today and verify it is functioning properly.

Around 6 p.m. this evening the spacecraft will begin executing a pre-science command load, which involves sending normal commands to control the spacecraft and resume communications satellite tracking with the HST high gain antennas.

“We won’t know if we’ve been completely successful until around midnight Wednesday when we demonstrate that the SIC&DH Side B is talking to the instruments and able to pass data to the ground,” said HST Operations Deputy Project Manager Keith Kalinowski at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Finally, I can come back to look a bit more at my space interests. My rsyslog project kept me so busy that I couldn’t follow space as much as I liked.

The first thing I see is that the Hubble Servicing missing has been postponed. There is a problem with a critical component inside HST, which, if not fixed, causes fatal problems. Thankfully, the faulty element is designed so that it can be replaced during a servicing mission. Also it was great luck that the component failed now, and not after the (final) hubble servicing mission.

The HST flight has been postponed to early 2009 (NASA tells mid-February as a “no earlier than” date) so that analysis can be completed and repair procedures be created.

As bad as it was, last year’s flight delays now have helped saved Hubble! Why? Simply: if not for the delays, the hubble servicing mission would already have been flown by the time the component failed. That would have been the death of hubble. So bad luck sometimes turns into good luck again :)