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Hubble Space Telescope Is In Safe Mode After Gyro Failure
- TimTheTinker 8y ago“No longer in operation” - not strictly true. Looks like it will return to operation soon, but in 1-gyro mode, which means its operations will be restricted.
- Arkight 8y ago1-gyro mode..... I am counting on how long can we keep Hubble up there, or how long until we need to put another costly service mission up there.
- maxnoe 8y agoIt only needs to be operational until the James Webb Telescope is available. As soon as this happens, most astronomers will jump ship anyway
- SiempreViernes 8y agoHa, good one! :D Like saying "it just needs to work until Longhorn ships" ;) In any case, JWST doesn't have UV capability, so it is not a straightforward replacement of what Hubble does. It just able to look at more distant objects because they've all been red shifted into the IR.
- baq 8y agocompletely different devices built for completely different purposes. there's nothing quite like the hubble.
- yholio 8y agoSure, but the jump is still tempting for the scientific top brass. There's only so much that can be learned in the visible spectrum and only so many Noble prizes, PhDs, tenures and grants to be had. Staying on Hubble is scraping the barrel when the new sexy JWST promises to open whole new fields of scientific inquiry.
- kamaal 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telescope.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telesco... Basically it will be launched in March 2021, if at all. By the way, every-time the launch year approaches they delay it by a good 2 - 3 years, and this has been the case almost forever.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoJWST and HST are not comparable telescopes. Moreover, the idea that astronomers would stop using one world class telescope just because another one (even a better one) exists is sheer lunacy. Even if a space telescope that was worse than Hubble existed it would still be completely 100% booked in terms of observation time, because there is much more demand for those capabilities than there is supply, by orders of magnitude.
- skrause 8y agoThere are no more Space Shuttles that could service Hubble. When it fails it will simply be dead.
- yholio 8y ago(Cut to Elon Musk, who begins to furiously sketch some plans on a paper napkin)
- stuaxo 8y agoIf someone else launches a similar mission, will he tweets that they are a pedophile ?
- melling 8y agoCut to Hacker News 4 years ago this month when I tried to make the case for sophisticated unmanned space exploration: “For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540712
- maxerickson 8y agoThe right thing to do would be to launch a bunch of new ones. (NASA estimated the marginal cost of launching a shuttle to be $450 million, which is going to be most of the cost of assembling a big telescope. Note that I said "assembling" and not "developing".)
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWould it be feasible if they "just" rebuild the Hubble with the original plans? I mean it's 30 years old by now but it's a solid device. That would save on development at least.
- londons_explore 8y agoRebuilding electronics from original plans which are 30 years old will be very hard. Components will have gone out of production, and minor design changes to accommodate new replacements will lead to a cascade of things which need recertifying.
- dredds 8y agoThe infrastructure no longer exists. The tooling no longer exists. Miniaturization makes old designs obsolete. Design is now the cheapest part of manufacturing. (See "Can we rebuild Saturn V in 2018") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhIfeS3OumY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhIfeS3OumY
- baldfat 8y agoIt took over 2 years just to make the wave mirror.
- thaeli 8y agoDOD transferred two "obsolete" KH-11 spy satellites (which are pretty much evolved Hubbles) to NASA in 2012. They've been in storage since. So the scope for a "new build Hubble" is putting instruments on those sats, launching them, and supporting the ongoing mission. That's still substantial, but much less than a new build from scratch.
- GTP 8y agoI don't know if NASA will ever plan to send a mission to repair it since it's already well over it's intended lifetime (by well over I mean several years which is a lot).
- baldfat 8y agoThe decay date for the Hubble is 2030-2040 so we should possibly get another 12 to 22 years.
- Zitrax 8y agoThe linked page contains the sentence "There isn't much difference between 2- and 1", so what restrictions are we talking about?
- dang 8y agoUrl changed from http://Twitter.com/NASAWatch/status/1049111536550273024 http://Twitter.com/NASAWatch/status/1049111536550273024, which points to this.
- bdamm 8y agoMaybe someone who knows satellites can help here. I assume with one gyro the satellite still has pointing function because one gyro senses in 3 axis, but that if that one gyro were to go it would no longer know where it was pointing or perhaps without enough accuracy for science. But... it’s a telescope. Couldn’t it determine direction from images received from a spotting or wide angle lens? Does it not have one?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 8y agoNo. The gyros are more accurate. If it were to use reference stars, through the big camera, any detected motion would be at least one pixel. So every image would be blurry. It has to react before any drift results in movement more than a pixel.
- frgewut 8y agoCouldn't you measure star motion over longer periods of time, then even minuscule amounts of motion could be detected.
- PeterisP 8y agoBy the time you can see the motion on your image sensors it's too late - you want to detect and correct the motion you need to do it while you're imaging stuff, before it smears all your measurements.
- PopePompus 8y agoActually, you can do substantially better than one pixel, because the point spread function is bigger than one pixel. Even a technique as simple as centroiding will get you sub-pixel accuracy.
- sandworm101 8y ago
- justreadthe 8y agoIt was originally asserted that the telescope required three working gyros. Later a method was devised to operate using two. [1] Background information describing Hubble's Pointing Control System. https://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/gyroscopes/ https://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/gyroscopes/ [1] 2005 article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7051-gyro-sacrifice-may-extend-hubbles-life https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7051-gyro-sacrifice-m...
- baldfat 8y agoThere is going to be no way to use it with just one. If someone figures out a solution they will be the hero of the decade. To bad the replacement James Webb Space Telescope is not scheduled till March 20, 2021, 14 years past it's initial launch date of 2007. It's initial budget was 1.6 billion and it will hit over 9.5 billion when it launches, if it launches. In 2011 Congress moved to cancel the whole thing. If the cost estimate exceeds the $8 billion cap Congress put in place in 2011, as is unavoidable, NASA will have to have the mission re-authorized by the legislature. Fingers Crossed (My Nasa Photo of the Day Wall Paper isn't going to be so great for the next 3 years I am afraid)
- melling 8y agoYes, we figured it out years ago. Instead of spending a fortune on manned space flight, spend the money on developing advanced robotics to explore space. In addition, the technology will be usable on earth in manufacturing, etc. We’ve had this discussion several times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315339 We can iterate faster, making less costly mistakes, and blanket the solar system with robots. It took about a decade for humans to get to the moon once America entered the space race. Everything is taking several times longer now.
- Bluestrike2 8y agoNASA's biggest challenge has always been a budgetary one, balancing some pretty stiff political headwinds with their efforts to get things done. People like NASA, and they're proud of it; for decades, the Space Shuttle was probably one of the most obviously American symbols besides the flag itself. People, regrettably, aren't quite as fond of paying for NASA. Even in the heady days after Apollo 11, people thought the money could be better spent elsewhere: > [Peter Flannigan, Nixon's assistant] also had become attuned to the reality that there was limited public support for ambitious post-Apollo space activities. On December 6, he sent a memorandum to the president reporting that “the October 6 issue of Newsweek took a poll of 1,321 Americans with household incomes ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 a year. This represents 61% of the white population of the United States and is obviously the heart of your constituency.” Of this group, Flanigan reported, “56% think the government should be spending less money on space exploration, and only 10% think the government should be spending more money” (Logsdon, 92). Which is ridiculous, and grossly ignores the economic impacts of NASA's efforts (whether manned or unmanned). But no politicians have ever really bothered to make those arguments. During the FY1971 budget process, a robotic grand tour of the solar system[0] (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, possibly Pluto due to the alignment of the outer planets) was quasi-considered and rejected due to cost. The Voyager program came out of that debate, at least. But FY1971 was a nasty year for budgeting, and NASA's budgeting in particular: > NASA had been caught up in a chaotic confrontation between budget choices and broader fiscal considerations, reinforced by a breakdown in the White House policy-making process. That chaos obscured a stark reality—that through its decisions on the FY1971 NASA budget, the Nixon White House and ultimately the president himself had significantly reduced the priority of the space program among the whole range of government activities. In the form of modest funds for continued study of the space station and space shuttle, NASA’s hopes for the future were still alive, but just barely (99). That's from John Logsdon's After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program,[1] which is a fascinating glimpse into some of the challenges NASA faced. You're right that, had we aggressively pursued--and funded--unmanned space flight, we likely could have done more science. But realistically, that was never on the cards. The problem with counterfactual scenarios is that we're often comparing them to an idealized scenario that relies on hindsight bias. In 1971, nobody at NASA genuinely thought we'd be limited to LEO for decades afterwards. Likewise, it's easy to look at STS and how it shaped manned spaceflight, and then come up with a list of better policy alternatives that could have been pursued with the same money. That ignores how the program's original approval was tied to specifics of the Space Shuttle. The program's approval was, in large part, due to NASA's acceptance of major engineering changes to gain support from the military and intelligence community though most of the capability they demanded was never actually used. Likewise, the expected cost savings of a reusable space plane were fundamental to its approval. Those cost savings never materialized, and in fact things went the opposite direction. We know that today, and there were clues even enough early on. But while there were probably better manned spaceflight options, STS--flaws and all--was able to build a wide enough base of political and institutional support to get approval. Other post-Apollo options didn't and couldn't. But the biggest factor, I think, is that manned spaceflight has cultural meaning. Politicians might eye NASA's small fraction of the federal budget covetously as something they could probably get away with raiding, but to date no one has had the guts to kill our manned spaceflight program outright. Probably because nobody wants to play the bastard who tells kids "sorry, astronauts aren't an option now" or destroy those childhood dreams adult voters remember fondly. Even if those adults now think money could be better spend "here at home" (as if we're spending it "out there" at a Space-Walmart or something...sigh). Instead of crowding out unmanned opportunities, manned spaceflight served as a sort of umbrella to give them just enough political protection to make it. Absent those perceptions, I think there's a damned good chance that the alternative to manned spaceflight wouldn't have been unmanned spaceflight. It'd have been no spaceflight. Maybe not right away, but eventually. Perhaps that could have changed had there been a president along the way willing to genuinely fight for NASA and was willing to spend the political capital needed to persuade enough voters to recognize the economic and scientific benefits offered. Unfortunately, the electorate was never interested in it enough and politicians never saw fit to try and change that. Particularly because the political benefits of successful space missions generally accrue years after the politicians who initially funded the program are out of office. Compared to that, a bridge with their name on it is practically an immediate win. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program 1. https://www.amazon.com/After-Apollo-American-Palgrave-Technology-ebook/dp/B00VILIVCE https://www.amazon.com/After-Apollo-American-Palgrave-Techno...
- ssijak 8y agoCan`t wait for James Webb telescope to be launched! And I`m a bit anxious about the process of putting it safely into space.
- codetrotter 8y agoWhy anxious? They’ve put other telescopes into space before. Is that one more sensitive or something?
- alexgmcm 8y agoDoesn't it have the crazy unfolding hexagonal mirror thing? I guess the increased complexity will increase the risk of failure.
- dahauns 8y agoApart from being the largest and most complex of its kind ever sent to space, the tricky thing is that it will be positioned at the Sun-Earth L2 point, far beyond the orbit of the moon. Hubble was as successful and long-living as it was because of several manned maintenance, upgrade and repair missions mentioned by others already - but Hubble is in a LEO, only a few 100km from Earth. The JWST? 1.5 million km. So missions like these aren't going to happen, this has to work on the first try.
- ygra 8y agoHave the Hubble servicing missions been actually cost-effective or was that more something that could be done because the Space Shuttle existed, although building a replacement would have been cheaper? (The latter would probably have had a problem having its budget approved, compared to the servicing missions, I guess.)
- reacweb 8y agoThe cost assessment of service missions take into account all the experience gathered when performing them. Even if a replacement telescope is cheaper, you do not learn anything.
- gazarullz 8y agoHubble has been in the orbit since 1990, out of curiosity, what is the designated program life and what replacements are scheduled?
- kumarvvr 8y ago[1] this article speculates operation upto 2008 (article was dated 2005) [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7051-gyro-sacrifice-may-extend-hubbles-life https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7051-gyro-sacrifice-m...
- docbrown 8y agoThere have been five (5) successful missions to Hubble—beginning in 1993, then 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2009.[1] The final mission, STS-125/SM4 (servicing mission 4), was done to prolong the life of the telescope. During the 12-day mission, they installed two (2) new instruments and performed two (2) repairs of failed equipment, and six new batteries in addition to replacing gyroscopes. This expected to extend Hubble’s lifespan by five (5) years from 2009.[2] So we were looking at an expected 2014 EOL date. The 2009 mission was an interesting event in itself with Hubble’s durability aside. During a talk from Dr. Andrew Fuestel, he mentioned how NASA developed specialized tools for him to repair Hubble mid-orbit—which he said were the scariest times of his life—during his three (3) spacewalks. [1] https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/missions/sm4.html https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/missions/sm4.html [2]http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/files/1ae7cac0d167055e41e1f0da7b0ac6a3-588.html http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/fil...
- exikyut 8y agoIs there a video or (hopefully) transcript of that talk somewhere? It sounds interesting!
- docbrown 8y agoThis presentation is from a different college speech and a couple years earlier than when I saw him but he seems to be talking the same general information about SC4. — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZh60_CxxJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZh60_CxxJM
- megakluntjes 8y agoOh no :( Safe mode is bad! The pictures will be limited to 640x480x256. Looking into the neighborhood will not be possible, too.
- NKosmatos 8y agoLet's hope they select "Safe Mode with Networking" otherwise they'll have a "brick" in orbit ;-) As a side note (nightmare scenario), image if HST had Windows 10 and was forced to do the fu$%ed up updates from M$ every now and then :-)
- fastbeef 8y agoSlashdot is that way, buddy.
- pc86 8y agoA profile two and a half years old but the comment quality of a twelve year old's throwaway account.
- fao_ 8y agoHi, you appear to be shadowbanned.
- pc86 8y agoNo I'm not, profile loads fine in an incognito window and another device. The comment is shaded because it got downvoted, which was probably appropriate given the snark.
- fao_ 8y agoNo, I vouched for your comment so I could tell you. The comment has now disappeared because I have now unvouched.
- vbtemp 8y ago
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- xupybd 8y agoI know the shuttle is long gone but are we at the point where robotic repair could be an option. The Hubble might be out of date but that would be a great exercise in developing repair tech.
- ispiansclsda 8y agoNot worth the cost.
- melling 8y agoWhy is the Hubble out of date?
- hwillis 8y ago28 years in space is a long time, and the new JWST has a 5x larger collection area and is fundamentally capable of detecting a much larger spectrum (the mirrors are kept colder). The HST has cost more to keep operational than it did to build at this point, and its construction was not smooth. Money might be better spent elsewhere. However, there is a HUGE amount of data still to collect from space-based telescopes. Even a crippled HST is a desperately wanted resource. It benefits us to have as many space telescopes as we can right now.
- mabbo 8y agoOut of curiosity, what costs so much in terms of operations?
- moftz 8y agoThere are a crew of engineers maintaining the satellite's position and operation while another team of scientists operate the telescope, review proposals, and schedule science time. Time also has to be scheduled for the TDRSS ground stations for data downloads. NASA is not the majority user of that system so there isn't a lot of time available. The data then needs to be adjusted and translated into something that can be given to scientists. There is an entire institute, the STScI, that manages missions for Hubble and will someday do the same for JWST and WFIRST. I'm sure there are at least a few dozen engineers and scientists that keep Hubble operational and busy. http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/ http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/
- markonen 8y agoPerhaps Elon Musk can send a submarine?
- wazoox 8y agoWhat about these two other, very similar space telescopes that were made available by some intelligence service (CIA?) to NASA?
- Keyframe 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Tel... that's one of the two.
- wazoox 8y agoAh yes, that's the context I was looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
- InclinedPlane 8y agoFirstly, they aren't telescopes let alone spacecraft, they are mostly just optical assemblies. Secondly, there are plans to make use of them in space telescopes but it will cost billions and take years to get them built and launched. WFIRST has already been planned and budgeted, though there is a proposal to slow down the program to accommodate JWST cost overruns.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThis situation makes me wonder when, if ever, this country will create a "technical congress". One that, given a reliable, non-revocable budget, makes the kinds of budgeting decisions that are best NOT left to the tech-ignorant politicos.
- DocTomoe 8y agoWould it be possible to dock a second satellite, with new gyros, to he deorbiting rendevouz ring they installed a few years ago?
- foobarbecue 8y agoScott Manley released an excellent video today about what this really means in the context of Hubble's various attitude sensing and control systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY169HtCazE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY169HtCazE