Hubble is back

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/update-on-the-hubble-space-telescope-safe-mode

by perlgeek • 8 years ago

768 116 8 years ago

gdubs• 8 years ago

“Last week the operations team commanded Hubble to perform numerous maneuvers, or turns, and switched the gyro between different operational modes, which successfully cleared what was believed to be blockage between components inside the gyro”

And here I am on Earth, barely capable of debugging JavaScript code.

TomK322• 8 years ago

They've probably done a "bang it with a hammer" equivalent.

rzzzt2• 8 years ago

I shake my phone vigorously if the small motor gets stuck and stops buzzing.

ByThyGrace• 8 years ago

And it works, doesn't it?

wereHamster• 8 years ago

And here I am on Earth, barely capable of debugging JavaScript code.

If as much education was required of software engineers as it is from people who work on the Hubble telescope then you wouldn't have any troubles debugging JavaScript.

protomyth3• 8 years ago

If JavaScript was specified to the same degree as the Hubble telescope then the OP wouldn't have had a problem. Blaming gdubs's education is a bit problematic.

vanattab• 8 years ago

I would be willing to bet that there are many engineers on the Hubble project that have and struggled debugging java script themselves.

flyinglizard• 8 years ago

Nothing to do with education; it’s all about operating procedures. Hubble has a large and well funded team behind it that generally operates on much longer timelines. Everything is engineered and documented to a tee. Hubble mission spans around 30 years now, from concept and until today; very possible that for some people, Hubble is the only thing they experienced in their profession.

Obviously such measures would be very much impractical outside of NASA.

jrootabega2• 8 years ago

It's also fun to compare programming to surgery, where they work for hours straight with no backup on a production system that is actively trying to die.

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

The universe is transactional.

elboru• 8 years ago

It has always amazed how hard it must be to debug an issue in a human being, you need to check A, B, and C, but if you check C your human will be scared since it could indicate your human has cancer, if you check B it will be expensive since it involves a lot of studies, you can also check with A giving some medicament but it also is expensive and maybe other people needed more. So you end up testing all three, but none gave you any feedback, the issue must be somewhere else, those tests took months and it doesn’t help you had been testing hundreds of other humans and for each case you must understand the whole context, so you have to start again, meanwhile your human starts to think you are not capable since you haven’t fixed his problem so he starts looking for a “second opinion”.

hutzlibu• 8 years ago

True.

But also surgeons make misstakes. Lots of them. Or don't find the perfect solution in time, needed to save someones live.

intrasight• 8 years ago

This is exactly why I switched from medicine back to programming.

taf22• 8 years ago

with your javascript you can cmd+r over and over again until you figure it out. with the hubble they had to simulate and hypothesize/imagine possible solutions. It's the same process just a different medium for solving problems and they generally get only 1 chance to press cmd+r

kabdib• 8 years ago

Henry S F Cooper's book _The Evening Star_ describes similar solar-system-scale distance debugging of a race condition on the Magellan Venus orbiter. Pretty tense stuff; the stakes are high, the tools and insight to the actual problems are poor, and if you screw up badly enough you wind up with a dead spacecraft.

ddingus2• 8 years ago

Because NASA is awesome.

ddingus2• 8 years ago

Well, they are. Yeah, I am a fan. NASA is one of the few all good things from government.

Government can be better, and I hope we can make it better too.

What else to say? I love a good NASA win, geek, nerd, engineering story.

redler• 8 years ago

Amazing. It's like they performed the Epley Maneuver on a satellite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver

TomK322• 8 years ago

That reads worse that it actually looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqokxZRbJfw

dang• 8 years ago

Url changed from https://twitter.com/NASAHubble/status/1056189182274625537, which points to this.

sidcool• 8 years ago

Amazing. HN community disagrees on almost all topics, except something like this. Best news in the past few weeks. Kudos NASA.

larkeith• 8 years ago

I will never cease to be impressed by the sheer skill and quality of design at NASA, that allows them to keep missions like Hubble or Opportunity operating far beyond their planned lifetimes.

sosorry44• 8 years ago

It amazes me that they are still in contact with the voyager probes. NASA does some amazing stuff.

SpikeDad2• 8 years ago

Reading about the specs and the planned degradation of the gyros is a very interesting exercise in planned reduction of a service.

They know the gyros will eventually give out and they have contingency plans around what kinds of science they can continue to do even when they're down to 1 gyro.

Very impressive. I'm always discouraged hearing people say NASA is wasting money and science and that's just not true IMHO.

pmorici• 8 years ago

You can achieve impressive results and still be "wasting money" if there were more cost efficient ways to achieve an equivalent result. I don't have an opinion on NASA but that could be the point of view those people are coming from.

Entalpi• 8 years ago

The problem with having non-science people run an organisation of science people is self explanatory.

In the Netherlands they have outsourced the organisation and managment of health care to the doctors themselves (roughly speaking). It is often cited as one of the main reasons the Netherlands rank #1 in health care ratings over the years.

planteen2• 8 years ago

Yep. I love space and science, but after working with NASA for a while, you see some of the problems. NIH syndrome is a huge problem, especially between GSFC and JPL. There are incompetent engineers who will have a well paying job at NASA for life. And then there the passionate, brilliant scientists and engineers the that dream and make it all work. A reduction in force of dead weight would go a long way but it will never happen.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 8 years ago

Wasting money criticism with regard to SLS is valid, I think, but is more of a political reality than a NASA issue.

howard941• 8 years ago

It's always a lead into cutting NASA spending so remind them that it's not a zero sum thing, cutting NASA's budget isn't going to cause lower taxes, higher spending on $THINGS_SHE_PREFERS, or a fatter personal wallet, it'll just be cutting NASA's budget.

wildmusings4• 8 years ago

Why wouldn't it mean those things? That's the essential nature of budgeting.

HenryBemis• 8 years ago

While people may think that this is wasting money, I see that this these teams gain unieque knowledge and experience on how to resolve issues on "machines far far away", and if we are ever to explore/move humans to a new planet, you want THOSE exact teams as 'helpdesk' that use anything and everything to bring things back to life and operation.

dmix2• 8 years ago

This is assuming generational knowledge can be sufficently passed down to be useful in future missions. I'd assume this is quite a niche/specialized skillset they developed for this particular machine. The utility of the knowledge has a limited timeframe which may not justify education of the next generation of scientists.

But regardless recording it would likely be helpful as most problems in engineerings seem to recur over time in different and new contexts.

deevolution2• 8 years ago

I think its reasonable to assume AI will be able to fix these kinds of problems in the future. They could run simulations of all the possible failures and solutions ahead of time or during operation eventually

zenmaster10665• 8 years ago

"so we just gave it a shake et voilà!"

- some NASA scientists, probably

azurezyq• 8 years ago

Interesting read.

On the other hand, I remembered that hubble was manually repaired by astronauts mutliple times back in the space shuttle era. I'm wondering that, do we have capabilities to perform in-space non-ISS-kind repairs now? Soyuz may be able to do in-space rendezvous but cargo space is limited. Soyuz+Progress composition (may be too complicated)?

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

No we no longer have this capability. Soyuz capsules are not really designed for EVA.

varjag• 8 years ago

You can do EVA with Soyuz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_5#EVA_details

However that mission will unlikely be possible for both technical and political reasons.

ourmandave• 8 years ago

From this link...

http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/#hubbletime

Each year astronomers from dozens of countries vie for precious minutes of Hubble's unrivaled view of the cosmos.

A review committee made up of experts from the astronomical community determines which proposed observations address pressing scientific questions and make the best use of the telescope's capabilities.

Each year more than 1,000 proposals are reviewed and approximately 200 are selected, which represents roughly 20,000 individual observations.

I feel bad for all the projects that got delayed. I wonder if they'll be rescheduled, or have to be resubmitted or are just out of luck.

ambicapter• 8 years ago

Some of them might not actually need Hubble specifically. There are a fair amount of observation platforms, maybe they can get their work done on another satellite.

antognini• 8 years ago

Perhaps, but given the competition for Hubble time, if you can get the data you need from another observatory you're generally better off doing so. For these competitive observatories you usually need to explain why your project actually requires those facilities.

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

To some degree yes, but most of the approved observation plans have already been sifted through the "can they get this done without Hubble?" filter.

superkuh• 8 years ago

Hubble is back but nasa.gov is black. A blank black page. All because their web devs wanted (or were pushed into using) some crap front-end lib that has no fall-back for no javascript.

nasa.gov's accessibility is absolutely terrible for a government website.

PetahNZ• 8 years ago

So enable javascript?

antoineMoPa• 8 years ago

Having the embedded software in the sky working well is a bit more mission-critical than having the website work without javascript.

rrrttrrr• 8 years ago

How is requiring javascript an accessibility problem?

jldugger• 8 years ago

Didn't the NSA gift NASA two hubble class telescopes with a note along the lines 'bought a ton on bulk discount and never ending up using these two before the new model was released'?

wongarsu• 8 years ago

Yes, but it was the NRO (I doubt the NSA owns any telescopes).

NASA has plans to maybe use one of them sometime, but because of how expensive the James Webb Telescope turned out to be doesn't have money to do anything with the second.

The wikipedia article gives some more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

yellowapple• 8 years ago

NASA has gotten out of quite a few pickles by using Earthside clones/spares of spacecraft to troubleshoot issues with the ones actually in space. Even if NASA had the money to launch the spare telescope, they'd be wise not to.

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

Not really. They gave NASA two "telescopes" that have mirrors and a chassis and basically not much else. It will still require billions of dollars and years of work to turn them into space based observatories. One of them is actually being built (WFIRST) but isn't expected to be launched until the 2020s.

Also, overall there isn't a huge advantage to this hardware. It doesn't save much money as most of the cost of the telescopes is in the other components: the spacecraft parts (including the attitude control system which as we've seen with Hubble is quite important) and the instruments. The biggest advantage to the NRO gifts (the NSA doesn't have telescopes, that we know of) is not that they make building space telescopes cheaper but that they mainly just make those missions more likely to be funded.

monocasa2• 8 years ago

Wasn't hubble itself a refit of a Keyhole 11 beta?

jsjohnst• 8 years ago

To my knowledge, no. It’s believed the two satellites NRO gave to NASA were KH-11 though.

TangoTrotFox• 8 years ago

The NRO (national reconnaissance/spysat office), back in 2012. They also gave them the mirror and other components for a third. They were hand-me-downs, presumably obsoleted. Things like that always make me wonder what the current state of the art is, let alone when you look at the things like the SR-71 Blackbird, first launched in 1964 -- 54 years ago!! On the other hand then you look at things like the F-35, SLS, Zumwalt, etc today and it somehow almost seems that we've regressed technologically.

Jenz• 8 years ago

Yay! Cheers to Hubble!

keithnz• 8 years ago

I love that they basically mashed all the buttons till it started working properly :)

datahipster2• 8 years ago

Ha!

They were able to recover the failed backup gyroscope by executing a series of attitude maneuvers while switching between operational modes on the gyro.

They literally shook the spacecraft and turned the gyro off-and-on.

Sometimes you gotta bang on something to get it to work!

I would love to buy a beer for the mission operations team member who came up with that idea!

dmix2• 8 years ago

I wish I could do that to my software sometimes. Just bang my computer to get it working.

cam_l• 8 years ago

It is cathartic, even if it doesn't work.

taf22• 8 years ago

You can - in Javascript for example:

setTimeout(function() { ... setTimeout(function() { ... }, Math.random() 1000); }, Math.random() 1000);

// winning!

zbentley• 8 years ago

In that case, you may enjoy https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy

Or its siblings, including https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs

baldfat• 8 years ago

They are the real heroes! This is such an amazing example of getting a job done.

cf498• 8 years ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/percussive_maintenance ftw

edit: I have to add, i just found out about the extent of the definition.

make a malfunctioning device or person work.

nielsole• 8 years ago

There is a German proverb about percussive human maintenance, literally translated to: slight hits on the back of the head increase the ability to think.

weinzierl• 8 years ago

Packing a punch is not only useful to fix things, but often the best way to get you an answer. Or as my control theory professor used to say:

If you want to know how an unknown system reacts, first thing you do is to hit it hard.

What he meant was that applying the Heaviside function to the inputs of a system to determine the step response [1] is one of the first things we should do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_response

noefingway• 8 years ago

a hammer is my go to tool for anything thats stuck. a good whack usually get things going ;-)

amelius• 8 years ago

Makes me wonder how long the fix will last, though.

rv-de• 8 years ago

Maybe they just grew up with Windows 95 where switching off and on solved 99% of issues.

datahipster2• 8 years ago

For those interested in learning the spectacular engineering that went into the Hubble: http://a.co/d/4kLahfW

reneherse• 8 years ago

That's definitely not what I expected to find at the link! Thanks for posting it. My father was an engineer on the Hubble, Hexagon and other reconnaissance satellites, and I'm sure he'll get a kick out of this "manual" as a gift.

Cogito• 8 years ago

For those not wanting to click on a shortened url, the long, non referral version is https://www.amazon.com/NASA-Hubble-Space-Telescope-collabora...

leo_song• 8 years ago

1990-?

Hubble is back

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