I saw this news article about the Hubble on CNN.
Can you spot what the trouble is?
(CNN) -- Engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland have hit a snag in their efforts to bring the Hubble Space Telescope back on-line after a major equipment failure in space last month, according to Goddard spokeswoman Susan Hendrix.
The Hubble Space Telescope's on-board computer went down September 27, interrupting its work.
Hubble's Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SIC&DH) system went down September 27. This is the telescope's on-board computer that coordinates commands to the various instruments and then downlinks the scientific data to the ground.
While that computer is off-line, most science observations are at a standstill.
The system was built with a fully redundant back-up channel called "Side B" designed to come on-line in the event "Side A" ever failed. Hubble team members at Goddard began a complicated process on Wednesday to switch over to Side B.
According to Hubble team members, this process involves sending comprehensive software commands up to the telescope to essentially take control of Hubble's suite of telescopes and other sensors through Side B.
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Hubble team members then will recalibrate all those instruments which went into safe mode when the computer went down, downlink data and then check the data quality against older Side A samples to make sure Side B is performing within specifications. Managers had hoped the process would be completed midday Friday.
Hendrix says problems cropped up in that process Thursday night. Team members are meeting Friday to discuss exactly what went wrong and to formulate a troubleshooting plan that will likely be implemented over the weekend.
Even if the switchover to Side B fails, Hubble managers say the design team had the foresight 20 years ago to build a spare SIC&DH system, which has been warehoused at Goddard all this time while the original instrument perked along just fine.
Astronauts are scheduled to conduct a fifth and final Hubble servicing mission, now targeted to launch no earlier than February, and are now training to remove and replace the malfunctioning computer with the spare.
That mission was supposed to fly this month, but was postponed when the computer failure occurred to give the ground teams time to check out the spare and astronauts time to train.
Rick Gelinas
rick@excellent-supply.com
