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Hubble repair mission delayed by telescope breakdown |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Friday, 03 October 2008
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 With two space shuttle poised on the launch pad, the planned October mission to service the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope has been pushed back to next year following a failure of the telescope’s command and data systems. The breakdown does not prevent Hubble from orienting itself towards targets, once oriented the telescope cannot take pictures or transmit data back to Earth. Complicating the breakdown is the fact that NASA had planned to launch the space shuttle Atlantis on a servicing mission in less than two weeks.
This is the latest in a string of system failures aboard Hubble. Prior to last week, the only operational observational tools on Hubble were the infrared and x-ray cameras- it is also equipped with visual and ultraviolet spectrum cameras. The Atlantis crew had a long list of repairs and upgrades to perform that would have extended Hubble’s life well into 2013. The failure of the data systems adds another task to the repair roster, and it is one that NASA had not trained for or anticipated. To evaluate the situation and train the astronauts to perform even more orbital repairs, NASA has delayed the launch of STS-124 Atlantis to an undetermined point next year.
While the shuttle team trains for to repair the telescope, the Hubble mission control team is working to get the telescope working on a backup channel, a process that will take up to two weeks. Engineers anticipate that the efforts to remotely revive Hubble will be successful, and even if they are they still want to replace the failed component so that the backup channel doesn’t become the primary (with no backups in the event of another failure). This is the first time in Hubble’s 18 year life that the backup channel has been used - none of the modules that will be used have been turned on since the telescope’s assembly and ground-based testing in the late 1980’s. Every month that the Hubble Space Telescope is offline costs NASA $10 million in satellite communications network time, booking fees, and staff costs.
To make things even more frustrating, there is a replacement part for the Hubble data control system is sitting in a NASA warehouse. Problem is, it was last checked out in 2001, meaning that if they are to send it up with the shuttle, it’s going to have to be thoroughly tested to ensure that the telescope lasts as long as possible. Testing won’t be completed any time before January, which would lead to a February launch at the earliest.
Once in orbit, however, the replacement job would be quick and easy: open it up, pull out the old component, put in the new one, plug it in, and close it back up. Two hours max, enough that it could easily be squeezed into one of the spacewalks to fix or replace five other broken or failed Hubble components. The astronauts will be installing two new cameras (the Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph), fixing two cameras (the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph), and replacing all of Hubble’s batteries and gyroscopes. NASA says that this component failure is nothing compared to the discovery of the flawed mirror that Hubble launched with in 1990. That defect left the telescope with blurred vision until a shuttle repair team installed corrective optics in 1993.
Already on the launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center is the space shuttle Endeavour, which was standing by to launch as a rescue ship for the Atlantis crew in the event that the shuttle was damaged too badly to return to Earth (and stuck in an orbit where if could not reach the International Space Station). Instead, it will be loaded with the cargo it was to carry if not needed and launched to the International Space Station in November. Carrying the designation of STS-126, Endeavour will ferry a cargo hold full of supplies and experiments for the station’s crew and will repair a malfunctioning solar array joint on the ISS.
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