Hubble Camera Lost "For Good"

Several readers wrote in to tell us, following up on the recent story of the shutting down of Hubble's main camera, that program engineers are now saying that the camera is probably gone for good. The trouble resulted from a short circuit on Saturday in Hubble's most popular instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA engineers reported Monday that most of the camera's capabilities, including the ability to take the sort of deep cosmic postcards that have inspired the public, had probably been lost. We'll be pining for more of those amazing images until the James Webb launches in 2013.
Update: 01/30 23:28 GMT by KD : Reader Involved astronomer wrote in with an addendum / clarification to this story: "I'm a grant-funded astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (www.stsci.edu) in Baltimore. I am very concerned that the article conveys the wrong idea about HST. While HST's science capacity is diminished with the loss of ACS, HST lives on and will continue to produce world-class science, even before its servicing mission in Sept. 2008, which will upgrade the instrument suite with the most sophisticated imagers in history." Read on for the rest of his note.

I'd like to point out these facts:

1. A fuse blew on ACS side two electronics — This will LIKELY (we're not 100% sure yet) render the Wide-field channel and the High-resolution channel (e.g. 2/3rds of the camera) inoperable. The solar blind channel will likely be returned to operation.
2. While we have lost (2/3rds) of ACS, NICMOS and WFPC2, two fantastic imagers, are still operational. WFPC2 is responsible for many of the gorgeous images that grace many of your desktop wallpapers.
3. ACS had an expected lifetime of 5 years. It met that lifetime. The loss of ACS, while of course disappointing, is not necessarily a shock.
4. Servicing mission 4 is currently scheduled for Sept. 2008. It will upgrade HST to never-before-seen scientific capability and productivity. The Wide-Field Camera 3, which will be installed then, will essentially be an even more sophisticated successor to ACS.

In short, the reports of Hubble's demise are GREATLY exaggerated. She will continue to produce world-class science and incredible images. While we are disappointed with the (apparent) loss of ACS, HST will live on well into the next decade.

You can view one of our press releases on this here: http://hubblesite.org/acs/.

No time in the upcoming servicing mission

[D'Eyncourt]

Before anyone asks: the upcoming shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope is already booked solid with other work.

Re:Not really . . .

[pixelpusher220]

the problem I have with the James-Webb telescope is it isn't a *replacement* for Hubble. JW is a non-visible (infrared) scope, and won't produce the type of images Hubble has.

keeping the masses 'in favor' of spending on space involves giving them some of the stuff they want, namely the magnificent pictures Hubble has been providing for years.

If they can't see it, then they won't want to fund it as much.

Re:Not really . . .

[jonfromspace]

It is not the cost of the instrument, nor the cost of a repair mission that will keep NASA from fixing Hubble, but rather a lack of available mission space to get a crew up there to do the work. The Shuttle fleet is under the gun big time to get the ISS finished before it is decommisioned. There is no other vehicle around that can dock with or, more accurately, "grab" the Hubble, so without a dedicated shuttle mission, a repair is impossible.

Looks like we will in fact be waiting till at least 2013 for any new deep field images. Atleast there is still a ton of science to be done on the existing data... So, in reality, this is much more of a loss for the armchair astronaut than it is to the real science teams.

Re:Looks like my wallpaper won't be changing for a

[pixelpusher220]

JW is infrared...i.e. non-visible. So I don't think it will be producing the same type of amazing images. A different kind of amazing, but nothing like Hubble.

Re:think i can wait...

[ogre7299]

For those of you that don't know, Hubble still has two working instruments, the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) and NICMOS. Both instruments are very capable of still doing good science. In fact, until 2002 the beautiful images we see were mostly from WFPC2, ACS wasn't installed until the last servicing mission. NICMOS is a near-infrared camera and still works fine. I would assume that repairing ACS would be a big priority now since its camera provided the best scientific data.

For those of you questioning whether or not Hubble should be serviced or just wait for James Webb, you ought to know that Hubble and James Webb will not cover the same wavelengths. Hubble covers UV, visible, and near-infrared. James Webb will cover Near to mid-infrared. James Webb can't do all the science that Hubble can and vice versa. However, ground-based adaptive optics imaging are hoped to be able to provide image quality as good as Hubble by the time it is ready to be retired sometime in the next decade. Also, because of the atmosphere, from the ground, we cannot observe all the infrared wavelengths that James Webb will be able to.

Re:The Beeb Disagrees...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hubble is scheduled to get a new camera (WFC3="Wide Field Camera 3") in the 2008 Servicing Mission 4 (SM4, http://hubble.nasa.gov/missions/sm4.php [nasa.gov]). The camera that just (mostly) failed (ACS="Advanced Camera for Surveys") would have operated in parallel with the new WFC3 camera. Hubble has yet another camera (WFPC2=Wide Field Planetary Camera 2) that is still operating normally. NASA loves acronyms. Long live Hubble!

service it quick

[gsn]

Yes this is very sad but even without ACS Hubble still has WFP2 and NICMOS so its entirely worth servicing it because it can still do bleeding edge science. I don't think there is much hope for servicing ACS. Most of the large ground based telescopes come equipped with atmospheric dispersion correctors (two fancy counter-rotating prisms) and Shack-Hartmann sensors and these along with the larger primary make up a lot of the difference for some science purposes, though ACS will be sorely missed and soon. HST proposals were due recently so they'll probably extend the call for proposals by a few weeks but there will be a lot of unhappy folks who will have to go back to the drawing board so to speak and start from scratch.

If you still want pretty pictures for your desktop - this is not really the point but its astronomy for the soul which is very important - then theres a fairly large collection of ACS images http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/frees earch/acs/viewall/1 [spacetelescope.org] and you can get some pretty stunning images from the ground with relatively small telescopes - some of the bigger names in astrophotography like Robert Gendler, Neil Fleming, Ron Wodawski do some stunning stuff.

Re:Could the NSA help?

[p_trekkie]

What if the NSA pointed one of their old drifting recon birds the wrong way and refocused it a few million light years from here?

I realize the optics aren't set up to do far-field imaging, but maybe it'd be cheaper and quicker than waiting to fix the Hubble?

An intriguing idea. However, I don't think it will work. The focus would not be the major issue though, as the difference in focussing between 500km and 500pc is relatively minor.

I suspect the main issue would be noise. Hubble's CCDs were specifically designed to have the lowest possible noise, whereas in the case of an NSA satellite, they have so much more signal from Earth (>1000x) than from the next dimmest thing in the solar system that the system might not be physically capable of taking the necessary long exposures. However, they might be able to do some sort of astronomy with a series of stacked images, much as is done with web cam astronomy. [navy.mil] Anyway, just some thoughts... there are probably other reasons it hasn't been done yet that I haven't thought of yet....

Re:Looks like my wallpaper won't be changing for a

[CommunistHamster]

True, but most of Hubbles images are in false colour. All the nebulae and supernova remnants for example are too faint to be seen by the naked eye excepts as greyish clouds, so the iconic images seen on APOD are actually colourised IR or UV images.

Misleading. You will still have great wallpapers

[iamlucky13]

Actually, although the Advanced Camera for Surveys produces some of the deepest and highest resolution images, especially of distant objects, it is the wide-field planetary camera that produces a lot of the most memorable images, such as the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula.

Hubblesite.org has a good layman's description [hubblesite.org] of the instruments on the Hubble.

Also, we're still getting many fine images of the planets, stars, galaxies, and nebulae around us from the Spitzer [nasa.gov] and the multitude of ground-based [nasa.gov] scopes that make great backgrounds. And don't forget the fantastic Mars rovers [nasa.gov] or Cassini. [nasa.gov]

James Webb is not a replacement..

[johnny maxwell]

..to Hubble, it's merely its successor by NASA. I think it should be stressed that they are different kind of telescopes, James Webb is supposed to be an infrared only telescope whereas Hubble is UV, optical and near-infrared.
Far to often people speak about James Webb as the ultimate replacement for Hubble. However the optical and UV bands will be lost without it.

Re:No time in the upcoming servicing mission

[Anonymous Coward]

The upcoming Hubble Servicing Mission already has two new science instruments on the manifest: the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3, a replacement for the venerable Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 - WFPC2) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). WFC3 wasn't intended to be a replacement for the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), but the new instrument should be able to do much of the imaging science that is now lost with the ACS visible-wavelength detectors down.

Information on the Hubble Servicing Mission can be found from NASA's Hubble site:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing /index.html [nasa.gov]

Re:Not really . . .

[jonfromspace]

You seem to have misunderstood me.

The SHUTTLE fleet is being decommisioned, NOT the ISS.

No, they couldn't.

[Eevee]

Mainly because NSA doesn't have any cameras up there. You're thinking of NGA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [wikipedia.org].