Posted on 07/17/2021 5:58:59 PM PDT by Libloather
NASA's beloved Hubble Space Telescope has been facing one of its greatest challenges. A technical glitch left it in safe mode for over a month. This week, NASA said it finally tracked down the source of the issue and tried a new fix, and it seems to have worked.
"NASA has successfully switched to backup hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope, including powering on the backup payload computer, on July 15," the space agency announced on Friday.
The telescope has been in service for over 30 years. The Hubble team had been looking at the payload computer -- hardware dating back to the 1980s -- as the potential source of a memory problem. "A series of multi-day tests, which included attempts to restart and reconfigure the computer and the backup computer, were not successful, but the information gathered from those activities has led the Hubble team to determine that the possible cause of the problem is in the Power Control Unit," NASA said.
As with the payload computer, the PCU is part of Hubble's Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit. The PCU is responsible for supplying a constant and steady source of electricity to the computer and its memory. Hubble is equipped with a lot of backup systems, including a spare PCU.
Since the issue cropped up on June 13, Hubble's science work has been stalled. The switch to backup hardware should give the telescope a new lease on life. "The Hubble team is now monitoring the hardware to ensure that everything is working properly," said NASA. It will take over a day to get the science instruments out of safe mode before normal science operations can resume.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Redundancy certainly improves reliability.
Perhaps the “Rocket Scientists” [non-woke, likely Western Civ Math enabled] of yore knew something?
CRT FAILS to explain this Scientific success.
COBOL is alive. I say ALIVE!!!!
When the early lens distortion problem was being fixed comedian Mark Russell said “Yes, they’ve had some funding cutbacks and so, yes, they sent up a guy from LensCrafters to fix it but they’re getting it all done.”
Yet the Voyager’s have kept on running on 70’s technology since day one. It seems that they will only stop when their batteries are depleted.
Which version of MS-DOS are they running?
Space Cowboys
And seeing how their batteries are plutonium, that's going to be a while.
Funny, we're often told that the Voyagers have left the solar system and entered interstellar space. In truth, they won't even pass through the Oort cloud where comets are born for another 50,000 years.
Sadly:
Voyager 1 is expected to keep working until 2025 when it will finally run out of power. None of this would be possible without the spacecraft’s three batteries filled with plutonium-238. In fact, Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power.
Wait until the James Webb space telescope is out there. Launch date is expected in November 2021.
I would like the cosmic space telescope to be in action before this decade is over. This uses the gravitational field of the sun to act as a primary mirror. Imagine having a mirror with a diameter of about 46,600 miles.
No doubt. Now that it is running on that redundant system, without the ability to repair the primary, when the redundant systems fails, turn out the lights Gracie.
How many appliances/devices do you have that have run more or less flat-out for 30+ years?
I don’t have any. Mostly because there’s not much I have that is run flat out.
Assembly worked great if one [finally] got it right.
I offered no critic of the Hubble Program. ZIP. I agreed with your position of redundant systems adding reliability. I almost have to agree with you on that simply because I spent more than 45 years building redundancy into various systems. I further explained that now that Hubble is running on its redundant system and we lack the ability to repair the primary then when the backup system fails (and it will fail, 3 months or 30 years isn't relevant), that IS the end of this program.
I'm not sure how your response above even ties into this outside of your 30 years quip. I do not have redundant washer/dryer, refrig, etc... If I did so with the idea of redundancy, then I'd be looking to get the primary repaired so I could maintain the redundancy. duh! Now, get those primary systems on the Hubble repaired. If you don't you are operating without redundancy. In your own words, it is now LESS reliable.
I can account for one Philco freezer that I owned for more than 25 years and it was at least 15 years old when I bought it. It was running flat out when I bought it. It ran flat out the entire time I owned it. To my knowledge it is still running flat out 6 years since I had to abandon it with my daughter.
NASA can do this but hard to fix Windows software here on earth.....
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