For Those Of You Worried About Hubble’s Camera…
Yes…the Advanced Camera for Surveys went into safe mode last Monday, after an anomaly was detected in the the CCD Electronics Box. Basically so I’m told, the voltages went above their high limits. So the camera went into safe mode.
We have a redundant power supply circuit we can switch to, and I understand preparations are being made to activate it. But they want to fully understand what happened to cause the safe mode first. They’re going to do this slowly and methodically, look at all the data, run a few tests, look at the data some more, one step at a time until they are satisfied they understand what happened. I’m told there is no cause for alarm, and we’ll probably get back to doing science with it by the end of the month.
June 26th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
I love the hubble updates and your connection to the project. Thanks!