William Atkins
Thursday, 16 October 2008 21:12
Science -
Space
Page 2 of 3
The NASA report continued,
”Around 6 p.m. this evening [Wednesday]
the spacecraft will begin executing a pre-science command load, which involves sending normal commands to control the spacecraft and resume communications satellite tracking with the HST high gain antennas.”
And, HST Operations Deputy Project Manager Keith Kalinowski at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center stated,
“We won’t know if we’ve been completely successful until around midnight Wednesday when we demonstrate that the SIC&DH Side B is talking to the instruments and able to pass data to the ground.”
It is now Thursday morning and other status reports have yet to come out of NASA with respect to this story on the fate of Hubble. We’ll continue to wait and see if this old and dusty 486 computer is still hitting on all of its cylinders.
Time's a tickin'.
A few minutes has gone by and “
Hubble Status Report #2” has now been released.
It states,
“During the night of Oct. 15, Space Telescope Operations Control Center engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center turned on and checked out Side ‘B’ of Hubble’s Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SIC&DH) system.”
Here is the good news:
“Subsequently, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instruments were retrieved from safe mode to establish that each has a working interface to the Side B SIC&DH. The instruments were then commanded back into safe mode, and will remain in that state until the SI C&DH begins issuing commands to them later today.”
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