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Hubble Trouble: Camera's Cooling System Shuts Down One Instrument's Operations
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NICMOS cooling system
NASA Hubble managers are reporting that a cooling system for Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) balked during restart after new software updates were uploaded last week.
Engineers reported that after software modifications were uploaded in preparation for the upcoming STS-125 mission in October, the NICMOS put itself into a "safe" mode after it self-diagnosed too high a speed in the circulator pump operations.
After modifying some software, engineers tried to fire the cooling system up again, and encountered the same problem. Early analysis shows what engineers termed "an erratic increase in speecf of the circulator rotor during turn on. The data are consistent with a perturbation of the rotor by ice particles (~10 microns to 1-mm in size)."
Suspected: contamination in the cooling loops used to solidify liquid nitrogen before the cooling system's original launch, according to NASA. After studying the problem engineers tried another reboot, which failed.
The Hubble mission management team decided to leave the cooling system in a safe mode to allow the system to gradually warm up and melt the ice. That process could take several weeks.
The shut-down of the cooling system will shut down NICMOS science until the problem is fixed. Whether or not the cooling system can be recycled before the crew of STS-125 works on Hubble in October is as yet unknown. The team already has a full schedule that includes five spacewalks in 11 days.
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