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Hubble is back

nasa.gov

101–110 of 128 posts

Re: Hubble is back

#101
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Servicing HST with a Soyuz is basically impossible. Hubble is in a higher altitude orbit in a significantly lower inclination than the launch site for crewed Soyuz vehicles. To perform the plane change maneuver (of 23 deg.) would require a delta-V of 1.5 km/s (20% of the orbital velocity at the typical Soyuz destination altitude). That would require bringing nearly 4 tonnes of extra propellant onboard the Soyuz, which isn't feasible. Additionally, this doesn't include the added weight of the docking adapter and Hubble replacement parts that would need to be brought along.

It's conceivable that a repair mission might be possible with the soon to come into service US crew capsules (Dragon 2 and Starliner) since the rockets that launch them have more performance than the Soyuz, but even then it would be a pretty ambitious mission.

Re: Hubble is back

#102
post #84

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!

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.

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.

Re: Hubble is back

#103
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the creativity and imagination required to solve this kind of problems is not really within current AI reach yet. The ability to take existing ideas and combine them in unique ways to come up with something new is very powerful, and not yet easily replicable by AI.

Genetic Algorithms are pretty creative. I think a bigger problem is that we have no general way to turn “what we want” into a mathematically formalised goal that an AI can work towards — we can only manage specific cases like “how many components does this signal generator circuit use” or “make a new face based on these examples of faces”.

Re: Hubble is back

#104

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!

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

Re: Hubble is back

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

The search space is so huge and the amount of training data we have is so little that AI, as we currently understand will be useless for this kind of stuff.

Re: Hubble is back

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i think that's true generally of any organization. pareto -- 80% of work done by 20% of workers. there's also some other law about the work being done by the square root of the total workers.

"pareto "

There is no such thing as 80/20 rule in science. Its a common "internet folklore" myth repeated over and over in internet, books and "experts" - without any scientific basis whatsoever.

Re: Hubble is back

#107
post #34
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Netherlands, a high density country without the added costs of delivering healthcare to remote places, spends 30% more per head on healthcare than the UK.

That has a far higher outcome on healthcare than taking doctors away from patients to run hospitals.

Re: Hubble is back

#108
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something similar happened in the UK with GPs, and it's been one of the least popular health reforms ever to take place.

(England, not UK)

Not sure why you got downvoted. The Lansley Reforms - where Primary Care Trusts were abolished and replaced by Clinical Commissioning Groups which are run by GPs and are responsible for commissioning most of the NHS services (about 2/3 of the budget) - are known to have caused severe disruption to English NHS services.

Re: Hubble is back

#110

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

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.

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