Posted on 09/29/2008 12:55:52 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
A serious equipment failure aboard the Hubble Space Telescope is preventing it from relaying data and images to scientists on Earth and will likely delay a shuttle mission to overhaul the observatory next month, NASA officials said Monday.
The glitch occurred Saturday in one of two sides of a device known as a Control Unit/Science Data Formatter that is responsible for sending data from Hubble to scientists on Earth, said Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the shuttle Atlantis was being primed for an Oct. 14 launch.
"The hardware failed, it's unrecoverable," Beutel told SPACE.com. "They did testing and it's no longer fixable from the ground."
Side A of the data formatter failed Saturday, with flight controllers in the Hubble's control center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., working to switch to the backup Side B to regain data relay capabilities. The data formatter is vital to science operations for Hubble, which had been using the Side A unit since it launched in 1990.
"It's used to store and transmit all the science data from all the instruments," Beutel said.
The malfunction will delay NASA's plans to launch Atlantis and a seven-astronaut crew to Hubble next month to perform an intense overhaul aimed at extending the observatory's mission life through at least 2013.
"Fixing the problem will result in delaying next month's Hubble servicing mission," NASA officials said in a statement. The mission has suffered a series of slight setbacks recently due to schedule slips from Hurricane Ike and payload delivery issues, and could be delayed to early February to allow more time to fix the new glitch.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
nasa,esa,hubble heritage team
Arp 148, nicknamed Mayall's object, is the aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the center and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. Arp 148 is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away.
I highly recommend checking out the set of Hubble colliding galaxies pics they have over at Space.com
Hubble Photos: When Galaxies Collide
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/igviewer.php?imgid=5051&gid=373
Arp 272 is a remarkable collision between two spiral galaxies,
NGC 6050 and IC 1179, and is part of the Hercules Galaxy
Cluster, located in the constellation Hercules. The two spiral
galaxies, linked by their swirling arms, are located about 450
million light-years from Earth.
STS-125 delay ,, major HST system failure
better it broke now than a day or two after they launched. ;-)
From what I read, they had a redundant component.
Side A failed.
Side B was switched on.
The system has no further backup for that component, but it still is working.
Yet, the article indicates it isn’t.
I IZ CUNFUZED.
Thanks!
sounds like they can cut to a backup but it takes a lot of work, and who knows what then.. glad this failed when it did.
—
snip from press release..
Additional testing demonstrates Side A no longer supports the transfer of science data to the ground. A transition to the redundant Side B should restore full functionality to the science instruments and operations.
The transition to Side B operations is complex.
—
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html
NASA to Discuss Hubble Anomaly and Servicing Mission Launch Delay
Sept. 29, 2008
NASA will host a media teleconference at 6 p.m. EDT today to discuss a significant Hubble Space Telescope anomaly that occurred this weekend affecting the storage and transmittal of science data to Earth. Fixing the problem will delay next month’s space shuttle Atlantis’ Hubble servicing mission. To listen to the teleconference live, go to www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.
As a result of the launch delay, NASA has postponed the planned Oct. 3 Flight Readiness Review and subsequent news conference. The review will occur at a later date.
The malfunctioning system is Hubble’s Control Unit/Science Data Formatter - Side A. Shortly after 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, the telescope’s spacecraft computer issued commands to safe the payload computer and science instruments when errors were detected within the Science Data Formatter. An attempt to reset the formatter and obtain a dump of the payload computer’s memory was unsuccessful.
Additional testing demonstrates Side A no longer supports the transfer of science data to the ground. A transition to the redundant Side B should restore full functionality to the science instruments and operations.
The transition to Side B operations is complex. It requires that five other modules used in managing data also be switched to their B-side systems. The B-sides of these modules last were activated during ground tests in the late 1980’s and/or early 1990, prior to launch.
The Hubble operations team has begun work on the Side B transition and believes it will be ready to reconfigure Hubble later this week. The transition will happen after the team completes a readiness review.
Hubble could return to science operations in the immediate future if the reconfiguration is successful. Even so, the agency is investigating the possibility of flying a back-up replacement system, which could be installed during the servicing mission.
Oh my God, that’s a beautiful picture.
There’s a poor design somewhere in here. Why include a B-side if it is such a pain-in-the-neck to switch over? All of our instruments have redundant command & data handling electronics, and we designed them so it is no issue to switch from one to the other, and routinely run them separately or together. Maybe it’s just a drawback of such old designs (Hubble was designed in the late seventies/early eighties).
Why don’t we just build a new one?
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