Back to Cool

It’s the third week of August and already some of my friends on Facebook are talking about their kids going back to school. It struck me as weird because I don’t have my summer vacation until next week. My kids start school the following week. Seems those times of school starting after Labor Day (3 weeks away) are long gone.
Here at Space Telescope, August has been a month for getting back to work with Hubble. Servicing Mission Observatory Verification (SMOV) has been progressing all summer long with very good results. We even got a bonus: NICMOS is back to cool!
The NICMOS Cryocooler System in the clean room.
NICMOS Anomaly
NICMOS is an instrument on Hubble whose acronym stands for Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph. The important word here is “infrared.” Since infrared light is emitted by anything warm, infrared instruments like NICMOS must be cooled down to very low temperatures so that they can detect the emissions of astronomical objects and not their own hardware.
In September 2008, the NICMOS cooling system had to be shut down during a spacecraft computer update. Attempts to restart the cooling system after the update resulted in problems. In NASA-speak, these ...