Hubble’s Universe: Hubble Servicing Missions, Part 2

Hubble’s Universe Unfiltered 03: Hubble Servicing Delayed (Part 2). On September 27, 2008, NASA was two weeks away from a space shuttle mission to upgrade and repair the Hubble Space Telescope. That night, Hubble suffered an electronics failure and went into its protective safe mode. The servicing mission was soon put on hold as engineers scrambled to diagnose the problem and activate hardware that had not been used in eighteen years. Managers also had to consider whether the failure left Hubble without a backup for a critical system. Now, a month later, Hubble’s vision has been restored, and the servicing mission, while delayed, has been expanded to include a complete fix for the problems encountered. — Subscribe to Science & Reason: • www.YouTube.com • www.YouTube.com • www.YouTube.com — * The next servicing mission to Hubble is commonly referred to as Servicing Mission 4, or SM4. It will be, however, the fifth servicing mission to Hubble. The third servicing mission was split into two pieces: SM3a occurred in 1999, while SM3b took place in 2002. The numbering of the servicing missions has stuck with the original plans, and was not updated to reflect the true count of the missions. * In contrast with Hubble’s low Earth orbit of about 600 km above the planet’s surface, most communications satellites reside much higher in the sky. Communications satellites are generally in geosynchronous orbits, an orbit where the orbital period matches Earth’s rotational period …