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Subject:
Update on HST safing - Tuesday
From:
Rodger Doxsey
Date:
Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:46:26 -0500
To:
st_all@stsci.edu


The NCS (NICMOS Cooling System) was successfully restarted Monday
afternoon/evening. It is working fine and cooling the NICMOS
detectors back down to their proper operating temperatures. In order
to avoid extra heat going into the NICMOS dewar and warming the
detectors, the NICMOS itself was intentionally safed on Saturday a
few hours after the HST safing. We are leaving the NICMOS in
safemode until the cooler gets the temperatures back down. The
current plan will be to recover the NICMOS to a standby mode sometime
on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning, depending on available
command uplinks to HST. The schedulers will be building an
"intercept" SMS that will start sometime on Friday. It will carry
out some quick NICMOS tests, and then carry out some routine NICMOS
science observations. We will also be carrying out a few WFPC2
observations.

With the help of some of the PIs and hard work by our Program
Coordinators and Contact Scientists, it looks like we are beginning
to accumulate a reasonable number of programs to execute next week.
The schedulers have some scrambling to do, but I am hopeful that we
can get to a reasonable observing efficiency next week.

The Anomaly Review Board (ARB) for the ACS will have its first
meeting Wednesday morning. Tom Wheeler and Ken Sembach are our
members on the ARB. One of their first tasks will be to assess
whether it is safe and acceptable to switch the ACS back to side 1.
This will NOT recover the CCD detectors (HRC and WFC), but should
allow us to use the SBC (Solar Blind Camera). The SBC typically is
used for only a small fraction of the ACS programs, but there is a
major program this spring to observe aurorae on Jupiter and Saturn in
conjunction with the Cassini and New Horizons spacecraft. This
program has already started, hopefully we will be able to continue it.

Meanwhile, the astronomical community has been notified of the ACS
situation. PIs (principle investigators) for six contingency
programs have been notified and are working hard to get Phase II
programs delivered to us that will use the NICMOS and WFPC2. PIs of
some active Cycle 15 programs have been contacting us to modify their
programs to avoid use of the ACS. The STScI has started a detailed
review of the active ACS programs to determine which have the
potential for being modified to use WFPC2 instead of ACS. While this
will be impossible for many of the programs, there will be quite a
few that can be switched.

As luck would have it, the deadline for submitting Cycle 16
proposals was last Friday, only 12 hours before the failure occurred.
We received about 750 proposals, of which 500 used the ACS in one way
or another. We have re-opened the proposal period for Cycle 16 for
another two weeks, until February 9, and encouraged astronomers to
consider submitting WFPC2 proposals to carry out the projects they
had targeted for ACS, if that makes scientific sense. We are also
encouraging astronomers to submit additional WFPC2, NICMOS, and
FGS proposals to reflect the fact that more observing time will be
available for programs using these instruments. We thank the
Spitzer Science Center for delaying their proposal deadline
a few days, which gives astronomers a little more time to work both
on HST and Spitzer proposals.

I would like to pass on my thanks and appreciation to everyone
who has already jumped in to help out in this situation, or will have
their work for the next few weeks to months disrupted by the fallout
from it. This is certainly an unfortunate and unhappy development
for astronomy, but one of our important roles as an Institute is to
quickly and decisively help the astronomy community and NASA get
through situations like this and back to maximizing the science from
Hubble.

Rodger Doxsey