This is no tiny little jewel box. This is The Jewel Box, a large star cluster visible with the naked eye, if the eye in question happens to be well south of the equator.
Photo taken by WFPC2 on the Hubble Space Telescope. Click to enplait.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars ~ mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination ~ stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern ~ of which I am a part ~ perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
— Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1
I have nothing to add.
Thanks to commenter “Dave” over at Bad Astronomy, for reminding me of this quote.
Yee-hah! After 15 years in the space biz, finally something worked! About time. Kudos to the amazing team of people who made it happen, ending with Megan McArthur controlling the arm, Drew Feustel fetching the tools and parts from the storage bins, and John Grunsfeld pulling out the old and clicking in the new.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys is what took most of the really cool pictures you’ve seen from the Hubble Space Telescope in the last few years. Then it broke. The A side power supply for the CCD Electronics Boxes (CEBs) lost its 15V supply in the middle of 2006. They switched to the backup (B) power supply and kept on running. But then at the end of January 2007, the B side power suppy fried itself totally, in what must have been a very exciting flash if someone had been there to see it. It was drawing close to a kilowatt for at least 10 seconds, and we’re basically talking a computer power supply here. The pressure sensors inside HST registered some gas at the time, so something toasted itself but good.
Too close to the next mission to replace the whole ACS (the first one took 5 years or more to build), but a certain scientist/engineer named Dr. Ed Cheng thought we might could fix it.
Some background: ACS comprises three cameras actually: Wide Field Channel (WFC), a 16 megapixel CCD camera with very low noise, which took most of the cool pictures; High Resolution Channel (HRC), a 4 megapixel CCD with smaller pixels, which was less used; and the Solar Blind Channel (SBC), even more specialized, and less used still. SBC was still working, but the WFC and HRC electronics boxes ran off the same power supply, thus they were both no longer working.
So. The plan: Remove the circuit boards from the WFC CEB and install new ones which take their power from an external plug. Then put in an external power supply and plug it in. Brilliantly simple! The new circuit boards connect to the CCD detector and the rest of ACS the same way the old ones did, through the original motherboard, which stays in. Simply brilliant!
Servicing Mission 4 to the Hubble Space Telescope launches on Monday (if all goes well). Weather looks good, and so far nothing schedule-killing has happened. Almost there…
The final walkdown of the Hubble stuff was today. No personal cameras allowed, due to they want to minimize the amount of stuff that might get dropped, so no photos until I get the official ones. Just words. And words cannot convey. We drove out to the pad under the hot Florida sun, took off jewelry (again, falling things bad), left cell phones and key fobs in the car (unwanted radio emissions probably won’t set off any of the pyro activators, but probably isn’t good enough), taped watches so they can’t fall off, tethered eyeglasses, and went up to level 135 (that’s measured in feet) where the gowning room lives.
It would be more heroic if it were something that could get to the moon, but it's still pretty.
Yes, I know that image is everywhere, but I don’t care! It’s a great shot, and it was created on government time so it’s not under copyright. Too bad the launch is scrubbed until tomorrow. I sure hope it goes up then, cause a month after tomorrow my astronauts go up to fix HST. And if this is delayed past tomorrow, SM4 starts slipping too. Which is okay for a couple days, but after that the trophy wife won’t get to go with me to watch.
Also, check out the EXIF data:
Exposure:
0.003 sec (1/320)
Aperture:
f/2.8
Focal Length:
200 mm
ISO Speed:
500
Holy carp! Those are some bright fuckin’ lights!
UPDATE: Launch is delayed until No Earlier Than March 15. And SM4 doesn’t actually slip unless this guy slips past somewhere in the 3/17 to 3/20 range.
Nothing official yet, but Florida Today is reporting that SM4 has been delayed until next year. Will the flight spare C&DH unit be ready to replace the failed one by then? Stay tuned…
(See previous posting for some help if you are completely at sea here. It may or may not help, but it’s worth a shot.)
Young man, there’s no need to ask why.
I said, young man, don’t you let yourself cry.
I said, young man, launch your crew to the sky
There’s no need to be unhappy.
Young man, there’s a place you can go.
I said, young man, where your stature will grow.
You can stay there, and I’m sure you’ll achieve
Many things they did not believe
It’s fun to star on the A-C-S–R.
It’s fun to star on the A-C-S–R.
They have everything for you all to enjoy,
You can rebuild without the noise …
It’s fun to star on the A-C-S–R.
It’s fun to star on the A-C-S–R.
Check this out! The ACS Repair hardware is loaded into the LOPE (Large ORU (Orbital Replacement Unit) Protective Enclosure) and ready for launch. Hubble’s best camera will be working again soon!
The ACS Repair hardware in flight configuration, stowed in the LOPE
You got your Low-Voltage Power Supply Replacement (LVPS-R) up at the top, and your CCD Electronics Box Replacement (CEB-R) at the bottom of the picture. The aluminum-colored plates on the top of each box swing up and out of the way by turning the T-handles, then the boxes slide out. Well actually for the CEB-R you also have to flip the green handles and move them out of the way first as well.
Once installed on Hubble, the harness you see sticking out of the LVPS-R gets connected to the CEB-R, where you see the red shorting plug on there now. There’s more info on ACS Repair at their website.
So now it’s up to the installation crew to get the carrier loaded into the payload bay, and then our astronauts to install it. And we have to not get eaten by alligators, which doesn’t seem too difficult.
Here are some more shots from yesterday’s tour of Endeavour. This post really should be put into my standard slideshow format, but when my hard drive died it took my /bin folder with it. I had /Applications and the important parts of /Documents backed up, but /bin is the poor cousin in the Mac hierarchy. So I don’t currently have the script to build a slideshow page. I’m sure it’s on some hard disk somewhere, but I don’t have it now. So you get ‘em like this.
Erin, Kathleen, and Becky in front of the VAB. We didn't go in there.
But nothing was happening in there, so we didn’t go in. Later this week they’ll be stacking Endeavour in there (attaching it to the external tank, and boosters). With any luck I’ll get to see that too.
