The Hubble Space Telescope is old. It is fast approaching its 31st anniversary of embarking on its mission to study the cosmos and, while perhaps 31 years may not seem so long, for a piece of machinery that orbits the Earth and that it supports everything that comes with being exposed to space, that’s a long time. It has worked well for a long time, returning amazing images and other observations of structures in space, but it will not last forever and this week showed its age.
On March 7, Hubble unexpectedly closed its scientific observations. Automated systems that monitor the health of the spacecraft brought about the change, putting the telescope in “safe mode” due to what is being described as “a software error on the spacecraft’s main computer “. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of the strangeness that Hubble managers had to deal with last week.
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As NASA explains in a new blog post, the error occurred at approximately 4 a.m. EST. When the Hubble team checked into the telescope to see what was happening, they discovered that something was wrong with a recent update they made of the spacecraft software. The change was supposed to help the telescope stay stable even though one of its gyroscopes was not what it was. “[The Hubble team] determined that the upgrade did not have permission to write to a specific location in the computer’s memory, which caused a problem with the main flight computer and subsequently caused the spacecraft to enter safe mode. ” , says NASA.
NASA says it is already working on a solution to the software problem and will recover the changes it made in the meantime so that the telescope can work again. However, when the team was looking very closely at the spacecraft’s systems, they saw another problem: the door to Hubble’s self-closing opening was open. The door is designed to close if the telescope accidentally points at the Sun, as this could damage or destroy some of its most sensitive bits. The team confirmed that orders and power were coming to the door engine, but nothing happened. Fortunately, a backup engine is installed for such a failure and now NASA will use the backup engine instead of the main engine.
Ugh! So that’s all, right? Unfortunately not. As NASA was preparing to return the telescope to its working mode, an “unexpected error” appeared in the wide field camera 3. NASA does not reveal many details about this, but says it will suspend the use of this instrument. until he can figure out what’s wrong.
NASA really wants Hubble to live many more years, and to be honest, the agency really needs it to keep working. With the incredible delays and cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope (thanks to repeated failures and the incompetence of contractor Northrop Grumman), NASA relies heavily on Hubble. We hope that any problems that may arise can be resolved.
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Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games over the past decade, addressing the latest developments and trends in VR, portable devices, smartphones and future technology. Most recently, Mike worked as a technical editor at The Daily Dot and has appeared on USA Today, Time.com and countless other web and print outlets. His love for reporting is only second to his gambling addiction.