Hubble Space Telescope is seen with ground view in this picture taken from Space Shuttle in March 2002. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)
Posted on 10/14/2008 12:30:45 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA will attempt on Wednesday to revive the $2 billion Hubble Space Telescope, which was idled two weeks ago by an equipment failure, officials said on Tuesday.
The breakdown of a computer needed to relay science data to Earth prompted NASA to postpone until next year a long-awaited space shuttle mission to upgrade the orbital observatory. That flight, which had been slated for liftoff on Tuesday, was rescheduled for February.
Engineers plan to send commands to the telescope early on Wednesday to switch over to a backup computer that has not even been turned on since before the telescope arrived in orbit 18 years ago.
"It is obviously a possibility that things will not come up," said Art Whipple, the Hubble Space Telescope program manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
"There's very little aging that goes on with an unpowered component in space," he said. "It's actually a very benign storage environment."
If the operation is successful, Hubble should be conducting scientific work again by Friday, Whipple said.
By delaying the shuttle mission, NASA hopes to fly a replacement data handling computer to restore backup capability to the telescope. The mission is to be the fifth and final servicing call by space shuttle astronauts to the observatory.
The shuttle program is scheduled to end in two years.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Hubble Space Telescope is seen with ground view in this picture taken from Space Shuttle in March 2002. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)
CTL ALT DEL
Abort Retry Fail?
Cut to Backup
Here’s to a clean cut.
Save The Hubble
18 year old computer? ouch.
/config sys high mem load
“Press any key. Over.”
“Rodger, Roger! We can’t find the ‘any’ key!!! Over!”
18 years old, with the Hubble Telescope be voting for Obama?
Imagine how much spyware it must’ve gathered in that time. < /s >
This undated image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a
ghostly ring of dark matter in a galaxy cluster designated Cl 0024+17.
(NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford/Johns Hopkins University/Handout/Reuters)
MS DOS 4 was pretty stable.
Maybe the Hubble took a direct hit from a sizeable object, and is no longer serviceable.
Hubble Space Telescope is seen in this picture taken from
Space Shuttle in March 2002. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)
I sure hope not,, it is a sitting duck tho.. it doesn’t take much mass when it’s going a gazillion miles an hour thru space .. it has done one heck of a job regardless.
I hope those 5.25” floppy drives are still intact..........
Highly unlikely. In the unlikely scenario that 'dark matter' even exists, it would not be clustered like that; it would have to be homogenously distributed in most of the universe.
The landmark 10th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's Hubble Heritage Project is being celebrated with a 'landscape' image from the cosmos. Cutting across a nearby star-forming region, called NGC 3324, are the "hills and valleys" of gas and dust displayed in intricate detail. Set amid a backdrop of soft, glowing blue light are wispy tendrils of gas as well as dark trunks of dust that are light-years in height. NGC 3324 is located in the constellation Carina, about 7,200 light-years away from Earth. This image is a composite of data taken with two of Hubble's science instruments. Data taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in 2006 isolated light emitted by hydrogen. More recent data, taken in 2008 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), isolated light emitted by sulfur and oxygen gas. To create a color composite, the data from the sulfur filter are represented by red, from the oxygen filter by blue, and from the hydrogen filter by green.
Maybe it was that guy in the movie “Mystery Science theater 3000” when he was using the robotic arm......”The Hubble! You destroyed the Hubble!” Too funny...
That looks like a medical slide from Bill Clinton’s last clinic test.
Is that Lisa Nowak’s ex-lover?
I have no idea. It’s some generic face saying “Oh Snap” to my eyes. :) Who’s Lisa Nowak?
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