By Patricia Daukantas

No sooner did we report on the progress toward the next Hubble Space Telescope repair mission than we have to note that the repair mission has been postponed for several months.

NASA officials, including Preston Burch, the Hubble program manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, today announced the delay after a serious communications glitch developed within the orbiting telescope. The shuttle mission, known as STS-125, may launch next February.

The glitch – which has nothing to do with Hubble’s optical systems – developed over the past weekend in the orbiting observatory’s science instrument command and data handling unit. An undetermined error caused “side A” of the unit to put itself into safe mode, thus interrupting the flow of science data from the optical instruments to researchers on Earth.

The Hubble team will try to activate “side B” of the data handling unit, which, like “side A,” has been in orbit since the telescope’s launch in 1990. Over the next few days, the team will assess whether that activation will pose any large risk to the telescope, and test out their theories using the Vehicle Electrical System Test (VEST), a copy of the Hubble support system bay that resides in the huge NASA Goddard clean room in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. If “side B” can turn itself on, astronomers can resume observations with the existing Hubble instruments.

According to Burch, NASA has a backup copy of the dual-sided data handling unit here on the ground, and Goddard researchers will start testing it for flight qualification. If the unit passes the severe vibration, thermal vacuum and acoustical tests, the fresh unit will be added to the STS-125 payload and the spacewalking astronauts will have to make time (up to two hours) to install it on the telescope. Of course, the backup unit is as old as the one in Earth orbit, but the space agency expects that tests will show that it still works.

Leaving only “side B” on the telescope would leave Hubble with several potential single points of failure, while the complete replacement of the data handling unit will bring Hubble’s communications systems back to full redundancy, said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate.

2008-09 September, Astronomy telescopes, space telescopes, hubble, astronomy, astrophysics

By Patricia Daukantas

If you haven’t already seen the OPN article on NASA's final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been online for a few weeks now, you’ll see it in your October issue of the magazine. It continues a long OPN tradition of Hubble coverage going back to the telescope’s launch in 1990.

Many developments have taken place since I wrote my article. Most importantly, the space agency has pushed back the target launch date of the space shuttle Atlantis, which will ferry seven astronauts to the orbiting Hubble, from October 10 to October 14, mainly because Hurricane Ike interrupted flight preparations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The astronauts lost a full week of training to the destructive storm.

Press reports also indicate that shuttle technicians had a few problems loading the equipment into the payload bay at the launch pad and have also had trouble with the insulation on the Hubble’s replacement batteries. Those issues seem to have been fixed. In addition to the instruments themselves, the Atlantis payload bay holds several specially designed carriers to anchor the Hubble instruments and the spacewalking astronauts’ tools securely in place for the high-acceleration, high-vibration ride into Earth orbit.NASA officials will hold a press conference on October 3 to announce an official launch date, based on flight readiness reviews scheduled for next week.

The Hubble repair mission follows on the heels of the 50^th anniversary of NASA’s founding on October 1, 1958. It’s a good time to ponder the triumphs and challenges facing the space agency. Although the Space Telescope Science Institute administers the science programs relating to the Hubble Space Telescope – allocation of telescope time to professional astronomers, grand administration and public outreach activities – NASA has done and continues to do the heavy lifting work of launching the telescope into orbit, pointing it at the heavens and fixing it when necessary. Don’t forget that if NASA hadn’t sent astronauts to correct Hubble’s original spherical aberration problem in 1993, a lot of exciting science would never have been accomplished.

2008-09 September, Astronomy hubble, space telescopes, telescopes, astronomy

By Patricia Daukantas

The clock is ticking down to the launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the massive international particle-physics experiment in Europe. The collider’s host, CERN, has its hands full with debunking rumors that the LHC is going to cause the end of the world.

Seems as if a small but vocal crowd believes that LHC will generate a tiny black hole that will keep sucking matter inward until it devours the entire planet Earth (mass: 6 × 10²⁴ kg). Court cases have been filed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to try to stop the LHC research; two Nobel laureates sided with the government to continue the experiments in one such lawsuit.

LHC defenders argue that there is no such physical theory that actually predicts the growth of microscopic black holes into macroscopic, planet-guzzling monsters. In a column called “Inside Science Research,” the American Institute of Physics (AIP) points out that if black holes really do evaporate as predicted by Cambridge University's Stephen Hawking, an attometer-sized black hole would survive for only a billionth of an attosecond – such a brief time period that there isn’t even a standard SI prefix to describe it.

In a more technical article written for scientists, Michael Peskin of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center reviews a Physical Review D paper that found no evidence that black holes on the scale of 10¹² electron volts (TeV) could create damage over time scales shorter than the lifespan of Earth. Since our planet has already been around for 4.5 billion years and the Sun has enough nuclear fuel to last at least another 5 billion years, I’m not worried that the world as I know it will vanish while I’m sleeping tonight.

The “first beam” of the LHC – analogous to “first light” for a telescope – is set for early Wednesday at 3:30 a.m. EDT in the United States or 9:30 a.m. CET for most of Europe.

To celebrate the arrival of the LHC, the Boston Globe published a stunning Web photo essay showing off the various component instruments. And some young scientists at CERN assembled this “Large Hadron Rap” song that’s garnered more than 1.6 million YouTube downloads already.

2008-09 September, Miscellaneous Optics physics, science rock, music