Hubble Is Getting Back To Normal
Hubble Moving Closer to Normal Science Operations
“NASA took great strides last week to press into service a Hubble Space Telescope backup gyroscope (gyro) that was incorrectly returning extremely high rotation rates. The backup gyro was turned on after the spacecraft entered safe mode due to a failed gyro on Friday, Oct. 5. The rotation rates produced by the backup gyro have since reduced and are now within an expected range. Additional tests will be performed to ensure Hubble can return to science operations with this gyro.”
Normal as in “hobbling along”, which is the way we do things in this country.
$20 Trillion economy*
Let that roll around your head the next time you hit a pot hole or read about a new high speed train in Asia or Europe.
Or the next time numbskulls yell about over-taxation.
[sorry. It’s just infuriating].
*https://www.investopedia.co…
Rather than “hobbling along” it seems like Hubble is on its way back to normal operation. I’m not sure how the economy right now influences what’s going on with Hubble.
Sure, normal operation until the next gyro fails. Hubble is living on borrowed time. Tick, tock.
That’s a given for any legacy system. Hubble’s been in service for what, 25 years? I think we can safely say that we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of HST.
Agreed, but it would sure be nice if we could keep it going a while longer. This is doubly true considering that the James Webb Space Telescope is over budget, behind schedule, doesn’t have the exact same capabilities, and isn’t successfully launched and operating. Can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
I’m really hoping that we can squeeze in one more servicing mission (either crewed or uncrewed). If NASA thinks such a thing would be risky, do it after Hubble is down to a single gyro.
There definitely won’t be any further Hubble servicing missions, both for economic and practical reasons (e.g., there is no shuttle with robotic arms to grapple the Hubble and maneuver the astronauts around).
Yes the space shuttles are museum pieces. I was not suggesting that a possible future servicing mission use them. Between Dragon 2, Starliner, and even Orion, a crewed servicing mission ought to be possible. An extra copy of the airlock module and robotic arm designed for the Lunar Gateway would make such a mission possible.
It isn’t clear to me a robotic arm is necessary. Just because that’s how it was done before doesn’t mean that’s the only way it could be done. Also, past EVAs (Gemini and Apollo) have been done by depressurizing the entire cabin.
But I still don’t think the timing works. Training the astronauts and putting together the replacement parts could take quite a while. How long depends on what you want to do. For an instrument (and since NICMOS isn’t working, so there is room for a new one), five years might not be unreasonable. For example, development of the Wide Field Camera 3, started in 1998 and it didn’t go up until 2009. Admittedly, it was scheduled to go up in 2005, and that was delayed by the Columbia disaster. But that still would have been seven years. If that’s the sort of schedule we’re talking about, you have to wonder if HST will still be working in 2025, and if we should be talking about servicing by BFR or New Glenn, not Dragon 2 or CST-100 Starliner.
However, a completely off the wall funding idea just occurred to me. People have (unsuccessfully) proposed dedicated, planetary science telescopes as Discovery missions. I suspect HST would actually be a better telescope than anything you could build and launch within the $500 million scope of a Discovery mission. If another servicing mission were possible for significantly under $500 million, it might actually make sense for NASA’s Planetary Science Division to fund it and shift it to dedicated planetary observations.
That has the advantage that planetary observations are, in general, dynamic. Observing the same galaxy with the same instrument in the same mode doesn’t significantly increase the scientific return. You could look at storms in the atmosphere of Neptune constantly for a full year and still be discovering new things at the end.
When the Cassini instrument I was responsible for broke down in 2011, and we were trying to get it back on, one of the people who built the spacecraft said something relevant. He told the head of the spacecraft office and myself that, “the warranty ran out a long time ago.”