The Hubble Space Telescope is flying partly blind across the heavens, a result of a short circuit on Saturday morning in its most popular instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
NASA engineers reported yesterday that most of the camera’s capabilities, including the ability to take the sort of deep cosmic postcards that have inspired the public and to track the mysterious dark energy splitting the universe to the ends of time, had probably been lost for good.
In a telephone news conference, Hubble engineers and scientists said the telescope itself was in fine shape and would continue operating with its remaining instruments, which include another camera, the wide-field planetary camera 2, or wfpc2, and an infrared camera and spectrograph named Nicmos.
“Obviously, we are very disappointed,” Preston Burch, program manager for the telescope, said at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., noting that the camera had basically met its five-year design lifetime. The Hubble telescope, Mr. Burch said, still has significant science capability.
Mr. Burch and his colleagues said it was unlikely that they would be able to repair the camera during the next Hubble servicing mission, which is scheduled for September 2008. On that mission, astronauts will replace the wide-field camera with a powerful new version, wfpc3, which will extend the telescope’s vision to ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths and restore the lost capabilities. They will also install a new ultraviolet spectrograph and make many other pressing repairs.
Noting that the five days of spacewalks for that mission were already full, and that changing things to fix the camera would cost time and money, Dr. Burch said, “At first blush, this doesn’t look attractive…”
Billions if not trillions on wars for oil. Not a penny more to service the most used instrument on a very useful machine. Useful, that is, if you have natural human curiosity, think it's worthwhile knowing how the universe works, and want to accelerate human knowledge. Not so useful if you are TheoConservative, weapons maker, or In-Q-Tel/ CSC/ DynCorp head of NASA looking to please your cronies.
But of course, the onslaught of the ignorant against the 21st century continues on many fronts.
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