Saturday 24 January 2004

Hubble Trouble

One of the many unfortunate side-effects of the Columbia failing on re-entry is that there aren't enough Shuttle missions left to both service the ISS (International Space Station) and service the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). In fact, I personally doubt if there are enough to fulfill all the obligations of the USA is servicing the ISS...
So currently the days of the HST are numbered. There will be no Hubble Space Mission 4 (SM4) to service it. Hence the following call for help (forwarded by a mate of mine):
To give you an idea of the scope of this work, one part of the spectrum will examine ways to carry out the work for SM4 without using a shuttle (robotic servicing, remote manipulator servicing, human servicing by countries such as Russia) to extend the life of HST as originally planned. On the other end of the spectrum, we will assume no more visits before a de-orbiting mission and look at the technical means to extend the life of the observatory (e.g. cycling the power off at night to conserve batteries, going immediately to 2-gyro mode to preserve the gyros, etc.) We promise to consider all ideas, regardless of how wacky they may first appear (I have seen some pretty wacky ones so far.
So.... any ideas, please e-mail me and I'll forward them, along with any I happen to think of.

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