IT crowd fixes Hubble space telescope

By The Inquirer
11:11 Jun 22, 2009 | 6 Comments
Tags: hubble | telescope | helpdesk | science

Turning it off and turning it on again works on just about anything.

NASA boffins seem to have rung up the IT Crowd when it came to advice for fixing the computer on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The computer, which was recently installed, was a refurbished PC which was built as a back-up before Hubble was launched.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the computer started playing up seriously and sending silly signals to the observatory's main computer. It then tried to stick all the science instruments in safe mode, but the instruments did not respond.

Boffins worked out that the computer was neither receiving nor forwarding commands. So they tried turning it off and turning on again. Any IT Hell Desk droid could have read that from a script, of course.

Magically that worked, and the operators on the ground were able to order the science instruments into safe mode. It turned out that the computer was okay after all and was just cracking a sad.

Computer boffins are still trying to understand the malfunction, but they seem to have forgotten that computers in the 1990s didn't have to have any explanations for playing up with such antics.

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6 Comments

alex8337 Jun 22, 2009 11:23 AM	When playing with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware (the ammount it cost to send that thing up and how much it cost to design and build), i somehow dont think that they'd be happy with just knowing that restarting it fixed it, they would want to know why it happened in the first place. You know i really like you enquirer but some things are just bluntly obvious and cant be used to argue with
ArcaneMagik Jun 22, 2009 11:47 AM	I still remember they bashed half of the stuff to get it to fit in with this recent upgrade. I like when hi tech gets so old that everyone stops giving a damn and you are allowed to bash it with tools to get it to work.
Tezlin Jun 22, 2009 12:50 PM	That's awesome.
smadge1 Jun 22, 2009 12:54 PM	The author of this article seems to have very little understanding of the troubleshooting process. More than likely they had a flow chart with all the possible issues on it, or a process to determine the issue and solve the problem. Resetting a computer is just one of the steps. Nothing magic about it at all. Like when the printers all stop working at once, I would go through a series of steps before restarting the server print spooler, or the server itself.
R430R Jun 22, 2009 4:38 PM	ok one would assume that algorithms would be used to do such a thing ..........but, why would they have called the IT guys to fix it when all they needed to do was restart it and give it back to NASA for them to figure out what went wrong?
MagnumXY Jun 22, 2009 8:23 PM	The IT Crowd was a show on ABC about some IT guys who knew nothing about computers at all. Expect for Moss...

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