Hubble’s Back in Business

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The Hubble is working again after a computer fault shut down the telescope.  Shortly after mission managers fixed the problem, (and a round of applause to them!) this image was taken.

The original problem caused NASA to reschedule until February 2009 a repair mission to the telescope by a space shuttle and now the repair mission is again on hold until at least October 14, 2009.  The latest problem aboard the Hubble presented new challenges for the repair mission, now having to replace a data handler.

In a way, it’s kind of a good thing events unfolded like they did can you imagine what would happen if the servicing mission was completed and then have the data handler quit?  Not good.

The disturbing thing is since the mission is scheduled after October 1, 2009, NASA will be operating in a new fiscal year.  Will current budget funds continue to be committed to the project?  Will President ??????? decide to cut funding to NASA and/or kill the project some other way?  Oh and by the way, I did email both campaigns about this a while back, a voter has should have a right to know these things.  One campaign didn’t respond and not only did the other not respond, but they put me on their spam list and boy let me tell you they can send it out – thankfully it’s easily filtered.  I doubt very much if I’ll be voting for Senator Spam-a-Lot.  And that my friends is about as political as I’m apt to get on this site.

Here’s the Hubble press release.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a “perfect 10″ both for performance and beauty.

The two galaxies happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. The left-most galaxy, or the “one” in this image, is relatively undisturbed apart from a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly on edge to our line of sight. The right-most galaxy, resembling a zero, exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation. The galaxy pair was photographed on October 27-28, 2008. Arp 147 lies in the constellation Cetus, and it is more than 400 million light-years away from Earth.