William Atkins
Wednesday, 15 October 2008 19:42
Science -
Space
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Hubble Space Telescope scientists will be doing an earth-to-telescope repair procedure this week, hoping to flip from a dead primary data formatter to a working-but-never used backup one. It looks that we have "A Go to Flip."
The HST scientists are hopeful that the Hubble Flip, the procedure to switch from a prime to a backup computer, will allow the valuable orbiting telescope to resume its normal astronomical activities of looking deeply into the universe.
Hubble went down on September 27, 2008, after its Side A data formatting computer failed, what is called by NASA the Hubble Control Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF).
As reported in the October 1, 2008 iTWire article “
NASA announces major delay in Hubble repair mission ,”
“Hubble uses a Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SICDH) unit to control numerous instruments, to receive commands from ground controllers, and to send data and images back to Earth. The SICDH uses the CU/SDF to store and transmit science data from the telescope's five main instruments and format it into data packets for transmission.”
On Tuesday, October 14, 2008, NASA announced at a media press conference that it has developed a plan to repair this problem from Earth.
Therefore, on Wednesday, October 15, they plan to begin switching the telescope to “safe mode” (that is, turn it off temporarily) and to then switch to the backup data formatter (Side B).
The switching to “safe mode” is a procedure that has been done on five previous occasions.
After this is accomplished, NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, Maryland) will send up various commands to tell Hubble to switch to the backup data formatter.
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