Hubble has a problem. NASA says that one of the cameras on the almost 30-year-old space telescope – the Wide Field Camera 3 – is no longer operational because of a hardware problem.
"WFC3 is the major imaging instrument on HST [Hubble Space Telescope]. It is, frankly, the best view of the heavens that humanity has," Simon Porter, an astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, wrote on Twitter. "But apparently some bloody fence is more important."
Although the Hubble Space Telescope has been observing the sky since 1990, the WFC3 was added just 10 years ago during a service mission. Over the last decade it has captured spectacular images, including a high-resolution version of the iconic 'Pillars of Creation' – a gas cloud inside the Eagle Nebula that was first imaged by Hubble back in 1995.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday January 11 2019, @05:28PM
These headlines are dull. They are rote. No, the USGS is not going to go away or our knowledge of national topography vanish because they're furloughed for a month. No, people not being able to go to the top of the Washington Monument is not the end of the world. Running around like Chicken Little about it is silly.
In a just world, the people who don't get paid when something like this happens would be Congress. They're the ones making the decisions, so they should be the ones who suffer the consequences first.
Washington DC delenda est.