Archives for the 'space telescopes' Category
The most dangerous launch, ever???
Published on 11 May 2009 at 4:10 pm.
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Filed under space shuttle, space telescopes.
Last night and this morning, I was listening to the news on television. Both times, the news anchors were covering the STS-125 mission to the Space Telescope. Both times, the person covering the story stressed how hazardous this mission is. One said that it was the most dangerous mission that the Space Shuttle has ever […]
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Reviving HST
Published on 16 Oct 2008 at 5:12 pm.
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Filed under space telescopes.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been given the appropriate commands to switch to its backup data handling system. So far, from what I have read, things seem to be going well. The backup has not been used since the spacecraft was launched nearly two decades ago, but it seems to be working. We’ll know for […]
Hubble side B given the go-ahead
Published on 15 Oct 2008 at 2:23 pm.
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Filed under space telescopes.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been largely out of commission for a couple of weeks now after a failure of its data handling unit. That has kept the HST from sending back most forms of science data. We did not lose contact with the spacecraft, so the craft was not out control or […]
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Hubble Suffers Critical Failure
Published on 29 Sep 2008 at 2:59 pm.
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Filed under space telescopes.
The aging Hubble Space Telescope has suffered one of its worst failures since launch. This weekend, the Science Data Formatter suffered an irrecoverable failure on one side. It cannot be fixed by uploading new software. It is dead. It must be replaced. This effectively makes the Hubble useless unless some […]
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GLAST = Fermi
Published on 2 Sep 2008 at 4:42 pm.
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Several months ago, I wrote about NASA’s plans to rename GLAST (the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope). Last week, NASA announced that the new name for this mission is to be the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who became well known in the 1920s and 1930s […]
Hanna and Hubble
Published on 1 Sep 2008 at 6:31 pm.
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Filed under NASA, space shuttle, space telescopes.
STS-125 is scheduled to launch October 8 on the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. That is a delay from a September launch that had originally been planned. But, in order to launch, the Space Shuttle Atlantis has to be rolled out to the launch pad. That should be happening […]
100000 Orbits
Published on 11 Aug 2008 at 9:30 am.
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Filed under space telescopes.
As I start to write this, the orbit counter on Hubble Space Telescope’s HubbleSite reads 100001. That means that the Hubble has traveled 2.72 billion miles in the last 18 years that its been in orbit. Of course, it didn’t really go very far. It is only a few hundred kilometers above Earth’s surface at […]
