Hubble Wouldn't Be Able to Run World Of Warcraft

The most famous and oldest machine that ever put us in contact with the universe malfunctioned a little more than a month ago. Ever since, the technicians at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland have been trying to rehabilitate the device's “brain”, namely switching to an alternative one, called “Side B”. The first attempt failed, throwing Hubble back into its unusual sleep, but the latest trials appear to be more successful. According to them, the fact that they're forced to cope with an “ancient” technology that uses outdated 486 processors may prove to be a good thing in the end.

 

The Hubble space telescope was launched into space in 1990 and has delivered unprecedented detail and information on the outer space's formation and evolution. Still, its main computers run on a long-since-outdated technology, using 486 Intel chips, the top-notch ones of the time, which would normally deter any computer user nowadays. But the experts from NASA have a way of communicating and repairing the “dinosaur” components. It involves training and tests on a full-scale replica of the computer technology and systems placed on Hubble.

 

According to the spokesperson for Goddard, Susan Hendrix, their headquarters host a system called the Vehicle Electrical System Test (VEST), situated in the biggest “clean room” in the world. That is used by astronauts during their pre-missions training, as well as for testing any new equipment that is set to be installed on Hubble in order to check whether it is fully compatible with the old technology. As the spokeswoman states, since “We just can't go up there every time there's a glitch,” the VEST system allows the scientists to determine what the problem might be and figure out ways to solve it.

 

Besides Hubble, there is also a bunch of other important spacecraft running on antique informatics technology, such as, for example, NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory launched in 1999, relying on a 1750A processor (approximately the equivalent of a 386 Intel processor) or the two Voyager missions which are now crossing the boundaries of the termination shock zone and which carry three computer systems each, with a total memory amount of 64kB. But the telescope's next servicing mission will not replace the processor, which would prove an extremely difficult task, since it would also require re-adjusting all the other equipment and hardware.

 

But, as Chandra's project manager, Roger Brissenden from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says, “Sometimes simple is good,” since there already are enough complex problems to deal with in Hubble's other instruments. Also, in Hendrix' rightful opinion, although Hubble's ancient hardware probably wouldn't be able to run World of Warcraft, “It's really reliable, and “There really is no need to upgrade it”. Perhaps building better future telescopes would prove less costly than upgrading Hubble.