More Problems with Hubble!

The Hubble Space Telescope has been completely out of order for almost a month. I have talked about the problems in my earlier blogs. In my last blog I talked about the fact that scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md were going to send binary streams of 0s and 1s to try and activate the back up device to get Hubble up and running. On October 15th 2008 the scientists started sending the binary commands. Key instruments including the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer successfully communicated through the backup unit for a brief moment before engineers returned the Hubble to the primary unit in fear of the telescope completely shutting down. On October 16, system monitors indicated that a power supply to the Solar Blind Camera failed to reach the correct level, and another, unidentified problem may have occurred, causing sensors to put Hubble into “safe mode.”

Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, says the latest developments are disappointing, since the team had hoped for a clean switch to the backup unit. The team is not out of ideas, though. A potential plan using a hybrid of theprimary unit and the secondary unit of the data processor may solve the problem. The Hubble team successfully tested this maneuver on a replica of Hubble that is housed in a clean room at Goddard. “This is one of the contingency cases we had thought about ahead of time,” says Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Systems Management Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “So far — touch wood — we are not out of options to get HST back on the air,” says Matt Mountain.

I hope that the hubble will be fixed as soon as possible, and that the "data processor" method will work. I do not really understand why the scientists did not leave the telescope in the "secondary unit mode". I know that the Hubble could have had major problems if they had stayed using the secondary unit, but isn't that a risk that they would have to take to get Hubble working?
For those of you who have not read my other blogs and looked at the pictures that hubble has taken, here is a link to the telescope's most amazing pics ever:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/legacygallery/gallery-9139/Hubble--The-amazing-space-photographs-universe.html

And now..... the attack of the smileys!!!! ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) :-) :-) :-) :-) ;-p ;-p

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