Hubble works but servicing slips

The final mission to service the Hubble space telescope has slipped deeper into next year, Nasa has announced.

Officials said the delay would give engineers extra time to prepare a spare control unit needed to replace one that broke on the observatory last month.

Hubble was taken offline for four weeks by the failure but has since been re-booted using a back-up system.

Meanwhile Nasa said the space shuttle Endeavour would launch on 14 November to the International Space Station.

The Endeavour is being sent to outfit the ISS for six crew members instead of three.

The 15-day flight will include four spacewalks to repair the station's power system and carry equipment to sustain the astronauts.

Path to launch

It was hoped the Hubble reserve control unit could be made ready for launch by February. April is now the earliest date.

The US space agency will then have to find a slot for the servicing mission in the sequence of construction and re-supply flights already planned to go to the International Space Station.

Evidence that science data is flowing again on Hubble came with the release on Thursday of a spectacular new image of a pair of interacting galaxies known as Arp 147.

Hubble's recent woes go back to Saturday, 27 September, just weeks before the fifth and final servicing mission was due to blast off.

Hubble's main flight computer put the observatory's instruments in a protective safe mode when it detected a malfunction in the telescope's Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SIC&DH) Unit. The anomaly was traced to a box that formats, stores and routes data gathered by Hubble's imaging instruments.

Engineers successfully switched Hubble over to a "B" formatter - but the failure left the observatory with no redundant capability.

The spare unit Nasa now intends to fly on the rescheduled servicing mission is as old as the telescope and needs an extensive programme of testing before it is declared flight worthy.

"Our plan overall takes something on the order of about six-and-a-half months from now," explained Preston Burch, Hubble Space Telescope manager at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"There's about a month or so devoted to inspecting and resolving any of the performance issues associated with [the spare unit]; about three months for environmental tests; and then about two to two-and-a-half months to do final testing and shipping down to the Kennedy Space Center and getting it installed on the orbiter.

"In addition, there are also approximately three tools that need to be developed to facilitate its installation on orbit."

Longer life

The final servicing mission will be undertaken by astronauts on the Atlantis shuttle.

The telescope's batteries and gyroscopes, which are used to point the telescope, are degrading and need to be replaced.

The orbiter crew is also tasked with installing two new instruments: the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The new instruments will improve significantly Hubble's ability to probe distant, faint objects in the early Universe.

The Atlantis astronauts must also repair two instruments that have failed in recent years - the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS).

If the work is carried out successfully, it should allow Hubble to keep operating into the next decade.

The Greatness Of Our Sun

For all the people in this world, the supreme star is not in Hollywood, it is at the pinpoint of our solar usage and is called the Sun. The earth is 93 million miles from the Sun and that reserve is known as one astronomical entity. All eight planets in our solar usage can hint their orbits to the gravitational weight of the Sun. The love and light, the winds and tides, the nights and being, the year and its seasons, are all the outcome of the Sun and its enormous life generous energy.

The Sun is a star as I avowed before. It is just one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. If it is correct that the universe was natural over 13 billion living ago, then our galaxy is certainly a little more than 12 billion living old. Not all the stars in our galaxy are the same age and our Sun is estimated to be about 5 billion being of age.

As the Sun shines under its own command, it does so by energy from nuclear fusion. Only nuclear fusion could make the colossal quantity of entire energy approach from the Sun and keep it open for billions of years. Near the axis of this great heater, 700 million tons of hydrogen is converted into helium every flash and 5 million tons vanish to become pure energy.

Every second, the energy output is level to the explosion of 92 billion one megaton bombs. You might be wondering how this median aged star is able to assert its shape and extent. The answer is simple. The Sun is made of hot gas, but it is also 330,000 period as enormous as earth. That kind of gravitational force is able to cuddle the hot gas together.

The hotter the gas and the bigger the squeeze from gravity, the elevated the anxiety gravity draws in and load pushes out. When a certain diameter is reached, the two opposing services are alike or balanced and the answer is a costume magnitude.

How big is the Sun? It is 864,500 miles in diameter, or 109 times as thick as earth. In reality, 1,300,000 earths could fit inside the Sun. That is cute large I must say. What do such facts mean? Translate some of this into things or experiences you are regular with. How about a commercial jet smooth roving about 500 miles per hour?

If you boarded such a flat and traveled to the spotlight of the earth it would take about eight hours. It would then take another eight hours to catch the other side of our earth. This is based on the known diameter of 8000 miles for earth. The Sun is so much better than our planet that it is comparable to the difference in dimension between a basketball and the start of a pin.

The same jet even would take 72 time to include the diameter of the Sun. Of course I am only with this example to illustrate the great volume of the Sun by comparison to our planet. No vehicle of any description could actually trek through the Sun because the temperature at, or near its primary is 29 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Sunshine is the most emotive force operating in our world today. Without its love we could not live. Without its light, we would descend into everlasting darkness. Without these two blessings of fervor and light joint, all the processes of spirit would determine.

All plant and animal life, with us, is dependent leading the forces that are brought about, and controlled by the beneficent emission of the Sun. Without the Sun, no plants, fruit, vegetables or flowers would survive, there would be no life. The book of Genesis tells us that our Creator gave us two great light; the greater to statute the day and the slighter to power the night. God said that it was good, would you not grant? I would grant.

By: Jeff Seward