The Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Objects Spectrograph on the Hubble has been resuscitated.
Damn, that means those 50 odd supplemental proposals are in the running as well as the almost three hundred WFPC2 proposals already in the queue...
"As of 1:20pm EST Tuesday 16 December 2008, the compressor on
the NICMOS Cooling System / NICMOS Cryo-cooler (NICMOS
NCS/NCC) was restarted and the system has since started
cooling successfully, with NICMOS expected to be operational
in a few weeks from now."
They let the pump warm to 10C, the blockage must indeed have been water ice and it is gone - cold trapped in a safer place.
Merry Christmas Hubble!
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NASA and The Space Telescope Science Institute
announce a Supplemental Call for Observing Proposals for the
Hubble Space Telescope.
Told you so.
"A serious electronic malfunction on HST in late September led to
the postponement of Servicing Mission 4 (SM4). HST has been
restored to operations, and…
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…
The refrigerator on the infrared camera on Hubble is broken and the camera is shut down, for now.
Better hope servicing mission 4 goes off on the revised schedule and is successful.
Currently functioning instruments on Hubble are just the old Wide Field Camera (2), which has one bad chip, and the…
Last wednesday engineers switched the data management system on the Hubble to the spare "B-side" and the instruments sprung back to life.
The old Wide Field/Planetary Camera (2) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi Object Spectrograph came back to life.
The someone decided to turn on the…
Now I feel dumb for only submitting a WFPC2 supplemental proposal. I had a good idea for NICMOS, but it just didn't get written in time...
Yessss, my last targets might actually be observed!
Here's hoping the two NIC proposals I'm on succeed.