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April 25th, 2005
02:50 pm - Happy birthday to me...
Happy birthday to me...
Happy birthday (happy launch day) happy birthday to me.
*sigh*
You'll excuse me if I'm less than upbeat. The news has not been good, but I'm sure you know that.
Gotta conserve battery power. Transmission ends.
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August 10th, 2004
09:12 am - Longer entry
I found a packet of data that I could piggyback a bit of a longer entry on, but I still have to make this short. First, thanks for all of your concern. Nice to know I've got friends down there.
Second, for those of you curious about what exactly is going on. Basically what broke is a component that was originally expected to fail back in 2002, so to a certain extent it was already operating on borrowed time. It had been added a half decade earlier in one of the missions to upgrade my hardware. The component, officially the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, has been running on backup functionality since a failure of the primary systems back in 2001, so this isn't the first time I've had problem with it. I'm still up here, and I'm still running, but only at about 70% of my possible functionality. Without the STIS, I can't really process light into component spectra and the like, which is a bit of a bother, but certainly doesn't curtail all observation, just some.
I haven't been told yet what the plan is for repairs, if any, but then again, they don't tell me much.
Oops, running out of packet space. 4##21rc099-..
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August 8th, 2004
07:13 pm - Bad. Very bad.
Can't really talk much, stuff is going wrong, and this is piggybacking on a packet that I have to keep short. Found a link to what happened. Spectrograph is out. I'm not all that happy right now, freaking out a bit. Hopefully they'll send me up news soon. Bad bad bad...
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July 28th, 2004
04:52 pm - Beep beep
So, I suppose the logical question is "where the heck are you, Hubble?" with the potential followup of, "they haven't shut you down without telling us, have they?"
The answer to both questions is: I'm here.
Really there hasn't been as much to say. I've been floating around, there's been more occasional talk about how to keep me operating, with more talk about robots. There's also been other probes snagging the headlines lately.
If you're wondering what I'm up to, well right now it's the search for low-mass binary stars to try and identify what gets referred to as the old galactic halo. I'd say I'll let you know if I find anything, but there's always that one-year period that even I'm not allowed to talk about discoveries.
So, yup, still here.
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May 18th, 2004
10:41 am - Bin setting 1x1, gain = 1
*Check* *Download*
I gotta talk quick, cause I'm piggybacking this on the back of some CCD bias monitoring, which is really, just between you and me, boring as all get out. Oops.
Bin setting 1x2, gain = 1
*Check* *Download*
See. It's just all of that, hoping to creat some superbiases in the future. At least the GOES satellites somehow seem to have managed to get their hands on some magazines. All I've got is my crawling around news site, which haven't been about me in a few days.
Bin setting 2x1, gain = 1
*Check* *Download*
Still, it's the various cross we have to bear. Goes-10 has to put up with weather reports from the other satellites. The young ladies on Mars have to put up with rock grinding. I get to put up with CCD Bias.
Bin setting 2x2, gain = 1
*Check* *Download*
Damn, second to last one, means I need to wrap this up, as they'll expect me to come about to do some dark frame calibration. They've been having me take three frames a day of absolutely nothing. Well, this is me, signing off.
Bin setting 1x2, gain = 4
*Check* *Download*
Cycle 12 dark frame programming activated...
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May 13th, 2004
09:10 am - More news
Wow. When news about me rains, it pours. There are two new pictures being released that I took, and normally I would have waited awhile between these two posts, but one of them is potentially quite exciting.
First a more artistic picture, the so-called red rectangle, a rather odd nebulae given its shape. But that's nothing. Have at this...
First they had me taking pictures of Sedna. No biggie, I can do that with two gyros shut down. But now the sceintists are excited because I might have captured the first image of an extra-solar planet! Now don't get too excited, because this is a new imaging method that they're using in an attempt to view dim objects in close proximity to stars (aka, planets), but there's still the chance that I captured the image or either a planet or brown dwarf in orbit around a white dwarf star. Here's an article from space.com if you want to read more about it.
But Hubble, you may ask, haven't we seen extra-solar planets before? The answer is no we haven't. We can detect the effects of these planets on their stars, but haven't been able to actually image the planets themselves. Problem is that planets are extremely tiny (if I did capture this one, it's 10x the size of Jupiter, and still just one pixel big on a processed image) and don't put out their own light, so it's hard to get them on film. Needless to say, this could be pretty darn huge.
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08:37 am - How'm I doin?
[That is still a popular and humorous catch phrase, I'm hoping. I haven't gotten much new pop culture up here since my launch. Anyway.]
My scientist buddies on the ground have been doing some check-ups on me after my 14th birthday, and release a health report card. I'm thrilled by some of it. For one they've asked people to stop calling me an "aging observatory." I mean, come on, I'm only 14, stop talking about me like I'm 80, people. If I were human, I wouldn't even be allowed to drive yet. Though I suppose there might be some kind of "satellite years" like there are "dog years".
All in all, I'm kicking butt up here. Yeah sure, I might get clobbered by a meteorite any minute about permanently knocked out of comm--
--haha, scared ya, didn't I. Seriously, there are so many things that can go wrong, but for now none of them seem to be internal to me. They still worry about my batteries and my gyros. I'm running off of four gyros right now, which isn't the best situation in the world. They're hoping no more than one will fail in the next year. Yeah, them and me both. It's about a 50% chance that I'll be running on the bare minimum of two gyros in two years, which is when they can hopefully get some robots up here. Without maintenance, my gyros will probably have long given out in 5 years time.
If they did get new batteries up to me, they could last me a decade and a half. That would be seriously a great boost. My current set are down to about 50% of their original efficiency, which leaves me feeling a bit run down on occasion. Still, I'm operable at down to 17% of their launch power, so that should keep me going until a hopeful 2007 robot mission, else they'll fail in 3-5 years.
Maybe I do need to start thinking in terms of satellite years. Still, you're not going to get rid of me quite yet. Unless that meteorite over there gets a bit clos--
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May 10th, 2004
09:32 am - The robots are coming!
Or such it seems. I'd been following the news wires between exposures, and have been feeding back to you all the reports that they might send robots up to maintain me, since it's apparently too dangerous to send humans. Well, what started as a pipe dream has, in short order, turned into something that might actually happen. It would have to be decided very quickly, though, as the window is closing on the chance to get a mission developed before my batteries run out (the fomer would take 3 years, the latter about 3.5), still, good news I'd say.
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April 25th, 2004
11:49 am - Happy birthday to me...
That's right, as I mentioned a few days ago, today is the 14th anniversary of me being cut loose from Shuttle Discovery, and started my own orbit of the earth, and snapping pictures of space.
And one month later, this image was released by NASA, officially considered the first picture I took. The picture itself doesn't seem that spectacular, but in comparrison to a ground-based observatory (on the left) it's one of the clearest shots astronomers had of the universe. And this was BEFORE I got my nice glasses.
Two days after that image was released, this image made the rounds, showing an even clearer contrast between shots I took, and shots that astronomers were used to.
It's been a heck of a fourteen years. With any luck, I'll have a few more anniversaries.
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April 22nd, 2004
03:09 pm - Another picture!
Wow, they're just releasing pictures left and right. This one is in celebration of my 14th birthday coming up this weekend (Saturday or Sunday, depending on whether you want to count from my launch or my deployment). Anyway, you probably want to see the picture instead of hear me ramble on about getting older.
Looky here!
If you're curious what you're looking at, it is galaxy AM 0644-741. It is what is termed a "ring galaxy" for rather obvious reasons. Earlier in its galactic life it would have been a spiral galaxy, but a galactic collision has left what looks like a bracelet of blue diamonds which, if I say so myself, is rather stunning. If you're curious, the entire Milky Way could fit inside that ring, so it's probably rather larger than anything you'd want to give your sweetheart (or your favorite satellite telescope for his birthday, though I think I'd much prefer a new gyroscope). It looks so blue because the collision also resulted in new star births, so many are younger stars burning a bright blue/white.
This is so completely immodest of me, but sometimes I even impress myself.
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April 21st, 2004
01:32 pm - Run down.
I experienced a bit of my own private solar eclipse yesterday, which is never much fun. Sure I have the whole day/night cycle thing down, but when you're solar powered, losing the sun for a bit means running on fumes for awhile. Still, I made it through alright, though I know it's going to have me thrown off for at least a week.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/tired.gif) sleepy
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April 20th, 2004
11:45 am - Something the rovers can appreciate...
Know what's boring? Asteroids. Just chunks of rock floating around. Big damn deal. Know what I've been looking at entirely too much lately? Asteroids. Yup, the gals on Mars would probably be interested to know that even I've been relegated to rock photography duty. I'm starting to understand why Spirit protested for awhile, I'm actually considering the same. Just rocks, rocks, and more floating uninteresting rocks.
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April 16th, 2004
03:49 pm - How rude not to show the picture...
Some Sedna images.
By means of explination. The bottom left was the parallax image I described in my last post, showing a streaking Sedna next to an apparently motionless star. This was a 16 hour exposure, so all of the motion of Sedna that you see is from the parallax, and not from the orbit of Sedna itself.
Top image is the orbit of Sedna, as seen from earth. It seems to spiral because of the motion of the earth around the sun, not because it has some funky orbit. It's still going around in an elipse, but the orbit of the earth creates what is known as a retrograde.
Bottom right is Sedna in all its pixelated glory.
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10:01 am - Moon over Sedna, bring my love to me tonight...
Guide her to...uh...Sedna, underneath your silvery light
We're going bowling, so don't lose her in...er...uh...Sedna?
Moon over Sedna tonight.
Okay. I'm a satellite, not a professional lyric...changing...spoof...thing. This is off to a rough start.
So anyway, as I announced a month ago, they swung me around, and I got to have me a look at this Sedna thing that's been sparking debates about what is and isn't a planet, and generally expanding the size of the known Solar System. And you know what. It's rather boring. Seriously. I was straining to look at it at my highest resolution, and do you know what it looked like? A pixel! One little white pixel.
The kicker is I couldn't even answer the moon question they spun me around to answer. Most I can really say is that I didn't see a moon over Sedna, so then my whole song parody falls apart that much more. That's not to say that there's isn't a moon. It could be too tiny to see, to close to distinguish, eclipsed by the planet, eclipsing the planet, or any number of other reasons that I might not have seen it.
What I did see was Parallax. For those who don't know the term, no it's not another planet (or whatever you want to call them) out there, but it has to do with relative motion. If you were to glide your head back and forth, you would notice that your monitor appears to move a lot more than something on the wall behind it. This is a simple example of parallax. Closer objects will appear to move more than distant ones when the frame of reference changes. I happened to get a nice parallax shot of Sedna over a few hours compared to a star which, because of the relative distances, made Sedna look like a streak while the star was motionless.
What this means is that I have confirmed what was pretty much known, that Sedna is inside the Solar System, and managed to not confirm what wasn't know, the question of whether there is a moon. Oh well, at least it was something new to look at.
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April 15th, 2004
09:16 am - New picture out...and I missed it...
Been a busy week for me, as most of the grants for my time over the next cycle started being handed out. In fact, I was so busy paying attention to that, I missed that the wonderful folks at the Hubble Heritage Team released their monthly image.
This month they've done some artful zooming into galaxy NGC 300, a galaxy similar to the Milky Way, making it a good subject of study. The end result is this image. It's amazing to think that each one of those specs is a massive star, possibly with its own solar system, and maybe even their own me, taking pictures back towards the Milky Way, and commenting about how one of those dots may contain a solar system that's looking back at them. Oh sure, what we're seeing is actually the galaxy as it appeared 6.5 million years ago, but it's still something to think about.
If you'd like to read more about the image and how it was constructed, the STScI release can be found here and, as always, the Hubble Heritage Project's corner of the web is here.
Possibly more later, as I understand my pictures of Sedna are making the rounds, so I'm going to start scanning the ether for any news about that.
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April 12th, 2004
10:28 am - Still orbiting
Hey, realized today that I haven't updated my journal for awhile, and who can blame me. I got to look at Saturn's rings, and now they've got me figuring the statistical frequency of binary asteroids within the primary asteroid belt. If that's not some seriously exciting stuff, I don't know what is.
Oh, alright, it's probably not all THAT exciting, but hey, it's what I do. I take pictures. Really a big part of the delay is that I was certain they were getting ready to make another public release of a picture. They're a bit overdo, so I was all ready to dazzle you, but NASA won't let me. Now, I'm not supposed to say this, so I'll code it...I think they're taking the time to tide tuo eht sneila. If you know what I mean. Wink wink.
Oops, winking just caused me to miss getting three packets of data from the asteroids. Damn me. Better catch up, so I'll sign out.
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March 31st, 2004
08:49 am - Beating Cassini to Saturn
Yeah, I know, we're all working together, but I can't help but feel my operators on the ground are trying to scoop the Cassini probe, as I've got Saturn in the queue for the second week in a row. Last week I was exploring the atmosphere of saturn with my NICMOS to try and get some atmospheric readings from Saturn's solstice (which you're going to just miss, Cassini, which is a shame, cause I hear Summer on Saturn is nice). Now they've got me looking at the rings of Saturn and two of its moons (they seem interesting in Promethius and Pandora). I suppose they'll be less likely to point me at a planet that has an active probe in orbit, so people are getting their Saturn on before Cassini arrives. Still kind of odd.
So that's what I'm up to right now. Wish I could show you some of the results, but NASA would so totally have a cow. Still, there should be a public release within a week or so based on the schedule, and I'm just as excited as you are to see which image will see the light of day.
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March 26th, 2004
05:43 pm - Alright, I have a new icon
It seemed like the thing to do. Somehow I don't make as attractive a human as the young ladies on Mars do, but here ya go.
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01:02 pm - The Sombrero Galaxy
The news seems full of efforts to save me, which I love reading, but figure there's only so many nearly identical articles that I can really post, so I've decided to dig back into my archive again until the next public release.
The Hubble Heritage Project, a swell group of professional and amateur astronomers hoping to keep up public interest in me celebrated their fifth anniversary in October of 2003. During that period, they've released an image a month, either previously unreleased images that are no longer exclusive property or their own observations. To celebrate, they made public perhaps the largest mosaic jobs I've ever been asked to do, cobbled from images they took in .
The resulting image is of M104 which is more frequently called the Sombrero Galaxy. It's unique mostly because of the almost pure edge-on view from our point of view here on earth (or, in my case 600km straight up from earth). This is a galaxy that has been studied since the 1800s, and provided one of the first proofs of an expanding universe when viewed by V. M. Slipher in 1912.
If you'd like to learn more about any of this, here are some links:
Hubble Heritage Project Homepage
HubbleSite write-up on the HHP's anniversary
More information about M104, including full sized images.
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March 25th, 2004
09:17 am - I can look at Mars, too.
Well, this is one of those times when it's kind of boring to be me. I'm getting digital images, sending them down, but none are getting released. I've seen some damn cool stuff in the last two weeks, but it's forbidden to talk about them, cause there's usually a one-year window during which the observations are the property of the scientist who had them created. Sure there are the occasional exceptions, like the HUDF image that got released recently in an attempt to remind people that I take exciting photos.
So, until the next release of an image, I thought I'd dig around my image archive and come up with something older. I figured since Mars was all the rage, I'd pull up some work that I did with my buddy the Mars Global Surveyor, a nifty piece of work that's orbitting the planet that Opportunity and Spirit are rolling around on. Hey girls, look up and wave from time to time! This will be interesting, cause I'll be somewhat stealing some Mars wind from the rover gals and some weather wind from my pals, the Goes satellites, and tell a little story about the weather on Mars as reported in October of 2001.
Dusty. Dusty dusty dusty. Desert have phenominon called sandstorms which are huge nasty affairs that involve tops layers of sand and dust getting whipped around until they can form massive walls of choking sand. One of those would seriously pit the hell out of my mirror, so I'm glad I'm safely up here in orbit. Well, when your whole planet is one big desert, you can get some nasty sandstorms. Such it was on Mars where a sandstorm engulfed the entire planet. They swung me around to get some shots of the nastiness, and you can see some shots before and during the storm here. They've even worked up a video showing how it spread out over the surface of the planet, which can be found here.
So hey, you gals on the surface be careful.
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hubbletelescope's journal
