Good blog by John Spencer on the Planetary Society blog on rescheduling HST observations during a Jupiter flyby
They had ACS observations scheduled to coincide with pictures taken by the New Horizons Pluto Express probe.
They can use WFPC2 instead, lucky sods, but needed to put in a modified proposal fast.
Then they got 20 extra orbits, since the end of ACS really does leave the current HST observing queue rather sparse.
Always a silver lining...
Now if they'd only go back to the very highly rated NICMOS proposals that were cut last year to make way for the large proposals using ACS they'd find lots of good stuff to do... hint!
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News item at NASA HQ website:
The B-side power supply on the ACS has crapped out
Not good, since they switched to it when the A-side went flakey.
May be fixable. Or not.
PS: there was a 3pm telecon on the status of HST today
if anyone was on it, let me know what they said. If there was anything new…
There are a lot of news on the space science front:
ranging from SETI's new "Sagan Center", through APL becoming a NASA field center to the "new improved National Space Policy, with Extra Classified Sections"
I'm way behind, so go browse NASAwatch for now, may catch up on the details in a few days…
Mmm. With 48 hours to go for the extended Hubble proposal deadline, about 360 new proposals have been received.
A lot of these will be reworked ACS proposals, noting that if they only get 4-10 times more orbits, they could mostly do what the ACS could do with, but with WFPC2...
And some will be…
Ok, it is really official Space Telescope news on ACS (dynamic web page)
Spare power electronics popped, not recoverable, may not be repairable.
They're looking to see if they can run the ACS SBC only off the A-side electronics (which failed last year, which is why the ACS is running on the spare…