Tech & Biz

Hubble Trouble

by mchawk | September 29, 2008 at 02:53 pm

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER - Shuttles Atlantis and Endevour both sit on their launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center, awaiting launch. This will be Atlantis' 30th mission and possibly its last. This is certainly the last scheduled mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

Mission STS-125 is designed to see Hubble to the end of its projected lifespan, with repairs, replacements and upgrades planned over 11 days and 7 spacewalks, but the mission has run into trouble before it has even launched.

Because of delays and complications from Hurricane Ike, the launch date for space shuttle Atlantis' STS-125 mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed four days until Oct. 14 at 10:19 p.m. EDT. The delay is not a surprise. The crew and mission controllers missed out on a week of valuable training time when they were forced to evacuate the Houston area when Hurricane Ike which hit on September 13. "You come to the question of either slipping the launch or cutting out events," said STS-125 Commander Scott Altman when the crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday to prepare for a launch rehearsal. "All [our training] needs to be done and we have to make it happen before we fly. And that, of course, may mean a bit of a slip."

The astronauts are training for a grueling mission, with five back-to-back spacewalks to install two new science instruments, as well as repair two others and to install six new gyroscopes, six batteries, a fine guidance sensor and insulation.

Today, NASA announced that much more will be asked of STS-125. What was first reported as an "anomoly" with the Hubble, has now turned into a major system-failure. Primary control systems (the "Side A" systems) have failed, preventing the telescope from making any observations or beaming any data back to Earth. It has gone into "safe hold" - a bit like your PC booting-up in Safe Mode, only a lot more expensive and a lot trickier to fix.

NASA are currently attempting to switch Hubble over to its "Side B" backup system - something that has never been attempted since the telescope launched in 1990. If this reboot is successful, then STS-125 will go ahead as planned, albeit a little delayed. Not as delayed as the mission will be if the "Side B" system fails to boot-up.

[A NASA memo reports]: “If the B side comes up fine we could still launch on time [...] If the B side does not come on line then we clearly have no mission as there is no way to get science data down.”

Evaluations are taking place on whether a replacement control system - to return redundancy to the telescope - will now be required to launch with STS-125. If this becomes the case, the mission would have to wait until the replacement part has been tested and sent to the Kennedy Space Center. This would delay STS-125 until 2009.

The memo ends with what sounds like NASA rolling-up its sleeves in the face of this adversity:

“We will dust off our plans and see what we can do."