The Hubble Space Telescope continues to fly blind nearly 540 kilometers above Earth, three weeks after science operations were shut following a glitch in an onboard computer. Nasa engineers have been working on fixing the school bus-sized flying observatory, which has faced a glitch nearly a decade after it was last repaired.
Nasa has now completed a test of procedures that will be used to reboot the payload computer that glitched on June 13 pushing all the science instruments in a safe mode configuration. The procedure could be tried on the telescope by next week.
“Nasa successfully completed a test of procedures that would be used to switch to backup hardware on Hubble in response to the payload computer problem. This switch could occur next week after further preparations and reviews,” the Hubble Space Telescope team said.
FIXING FAULTS IN THE PAST
The telescope was last repaired in 2009 after it was first deployed by space shuttle Discovery in 1990. In its over three decades-long service above Earth, the telescope has faced several glitches which were repaired in time to resume operations, however, the current glitch is taking longer than expected for engineers to pinpoint and send a patch. The telescope earlier encountered problems related to its Imaging Spectrograph that suffered a power failure in 2004, followed by an electrical short in 2007 that affected its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) — the primary camera for the telescope.
Even as engineers struggle to find the exact problem in the hardware, Nasa is confident of solving the issue and resuming science operations. “The telescope itself and its science instruments remain in good health and are currently in a safe configuration,” Nasa had said in a statement.
The faulty payload computer controls and coordinates the science instruments onboard the spacecraft. Following the sudden halt in the module, the computer stopped receiving a “keep-alive” signal, which indicates that all is well. As soon as the fault occurred, the main computer placed all science instruments in a safe-mode configuration.
WHAT IS THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE?
The Hubble Space telescope is a flying observatory in space that was developed by Nasa and the European Space Agency to look beyond the visibility from Earth. Unlike other telescopes on Earth, Hubble, flying in space has a unique ability of not being affected by the planet’s thick atmosphere that tends to distort the view field.
The telescope has made over 1.5 million observations since its launch in 1990, capturing stunning subjects from black holes to Nebula to galaxies. Over the years, the telescope has been upgraded several times boosting its capabilities and extending its operational life. According to Nasa, over 18,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published on its discoveries, which includes tracking interstellar objects as they soared through our solar system, watching a comet collide with Jupiter, and discovering the moons around Pluto.
“Hubble has peered back into our universe’s distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light-years from Earth, capturing galaxies merging, probing the supermassive black holes that lurk in their depths, and helping us better understand the history of the expanding universe,” Nasa said.
