- One of the four science instruments onboard NASA's ailing
Hubble Space Telescope failed last week, the space agency said Friday.
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- The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, was
used by astronomers to detect black holes and measure the temperatures
of stars, among other things. The instrument failed to respond to a test
command and went into suspension shortly after noon Eastern Daylight Time
on Aug. 3, according to a mission status report.
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- NASA engineers said they believe a malfunctioning power
converter is to blame. A similar malfunction in 2001 took the instrument's
first power converter offline, leaving it without a backup.
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- "Accordingly, it is now believed that STIS's mechanism
functions are inoperable and unrecoverable," said NASA managers in
a status report released Friday. "Because STIS has been single-string
in its electronics since May 2001, it can no longer be used for science
observations."
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- Astronauts installed the STIS during a spacewalk in 1997.
It has already exceeded its planned lifetime of five years.
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- Still, Hubble advocates are likely to see the failure
as yet another reason for NASA to send either humans or robots on a mission
to repair Hubble.
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- In January, NASA chief administrator Sean O'Keefe raised
the ire of many scientists and space enthusiasts when he announced that
the space agency would not plan a servicing mission due to safety concerns.
But after being pressured to reconsider by scientists and lawmakers, O'Keefe
later said the agency would not rule out a robotic mission if one could
be assembled in time.
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- Without a servicing mission, Hubble is expected to fail
altogether by 2007 or 2008. That is when the telescope's batteries or its
gyroscopes will give out, according to NASA engineers.
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- The space agency said Friday that Hubble's other three
instruments -- the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer,
the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 --
are all operating normally.
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