Earth's Eye in the Sky Goes Out!

[Dashken]

Engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, located in Baltimore, Md., reported that the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) abruptly went off-line Monday. The ACS is a third-generation camera installed during a space shuttle mission in 2002. Ground engineers are busy searching for the root cause of the malfunction and working out an effective repair operation.

Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman with the firm responsible for maintaining and managing the Hubble telescope, the Goddard Space Flight Center, near Baltimore, expressed optimism and said that the engineers and technicians are confident that it will soon be fixed.

The problem with the ACS has not caused the entire telescope to cease functioning. Managers are scrambling to power up Hubble's other cameras to accommodate ongoing scientific and astronomical studies.

An associate program manager at Goddard, Ed Ruitberg, reportedly told the press that the most likely cause of the malfunction could be a low power output of the voltage supply interface energizing the main camera system. He said that there is redundant electronic circuitry waiting on standby that can be activated to awaken the ACS.

The telescope is named after Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who refuted the "Fixed Universe" theory in the 1920s when he discovered that galaxies (composed of billions of stars) actually move away from one another. The astronomer's findings soon led to the formulation of the Big Bang theory, that cataclysmic event that many scientists believe occurred some 15 billion earth years ago. The current expanding universe provides strong proof of the violent beginnings of the entire cosmos.

Launched in 1990, Hubble has allowed astronomers to peer into the distant reaches of space. Because it is located outside the Earth's atmosphere, it can take sharp optical images of even very faint objects from great distances. A dazzling array of stunning cosmic imagery has been captured by Hubble's ACS as it zoomed into the murky depths of galaxies trillions of light-years away. Scientists even deduced the age of the universe by using Hubble to observe the edge of space.

In 1998, a scientific and astronomical team found visual evidence of a massive cosmic explosion second in intensity only to the Big Bang, which they called GRB (gamma-ray burst) 971214. Published in Nature, the team's findings claimed that the Big Bang happened some 12 billion light-years from Earth. The explosion is said to have had an impact many times greater than a supernova.

Though considered one of the most important achievements of human civilization, the Hubble Space Telescope has been beset with many problems since it was first conceived in 1946. Delays and monetary constraints plagued the project and soon after it finally launched in 1990, engineers discovered that the primary mirror was not positioned correctly, constricting the telescope's capabilities. A shuttle mission in 1993 corrected the mirror.

A lot of work is needed to maintain the telescope, however. For one, if Hubble's stabilizing gyroscopes are not replaced soon, engineers calculate that in 2010, unable to sustain its orbit, the space observatory will succumb to Earth's strong gravitational pull and burn up in the atmosphere. Fixing the problem will be very risky because of the current flawed structural design of space shuttles.

NASA has plans to build another much more enormous telescope whose mirrors are projected to be about the size of a football field. But realizing the grandiose project is still decades away because of the limitations of current technology.

For now, another space shuttle servicing mission is being considered to install a new camera and study the possibilities of solving the orbital control problems. But NASA will not discuss such plans at least until October.

Source: http://english.ohmynews.com/articlev...01058&rel_no=1

Must be alien...

[Trinity]

They fixed it.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/0....ap/index.html

[Adrian Wong]

LOL!! Dash and his aliens!