Oh, the Hubble is acting weird – BGR

The Hubble Space Telescope is old. It is fast approaching its 31st anniversary of its launch on its mission to study the cosmos, and while 31 years may not seem that long, for a piece of machine orbiting the Earth – and tolerating everything that comes with it. exposure to space – is that a very long time. It has worked well for a long time, returning some incredible images and other observations of structures in space, but it won’t last forever, and this week it showed its age.

On March 7, Hubble unexpectedly stopped its scientific observations. The automated systems that keep track of the spacecraft’s health triggered the switch, putting the telescope into ‘safe mode’ due to what is described as ‘a software glitch in the spacecraft’s main computer’. Sadly, that was just the start of the craziness Hubble’s handlers had to deal with over the past week.

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As NASA explains in a new blog post, the error occurred at about 4 a.m. EST. When the Hubble team checked into the telescope to see what was going on, they found that something was wrong in a recent update they had done in the spacecraft’s software. The change was supposed to help the telescope stay stable even though one of its gyroscopes was no longer what it was.[The Hubble team] found that the enhancement did not have permission to write to a specific location in computer memory, causing a problem with the main flight computer and then causing the spacecraft to enter a safe mode, ”says NASA.

NASA says it is already working on a fix for the software problem and will roll back the changes it has made in the meantime so the telescope can get back to work. However, when the team looked closely at the spacecraft’s systems, they saw another problem: Hubble’s auto-closing opening door was open. The door is designed to close if the telescope accidentally points towards the sun, as this can damage or destroy some of the most sensitive parts. The team confirmed that commands and force reached the door’s motor, but nothing happened. Fortunately, a spare engine has been installed for such a failure, and NASA will now use the spare engine in place of the primary engine.

Relief! So that’s it, right? Unfortunately not. While NASA was preparing to return the telescope to its working mode, an “unexpected error” occurred in the Wide Field Camera 3. NASA doesn’t reveal many details on this, but says it will suspend use of that tool until it can figure out what’s wrong.

NASA really wants Hubble to live on for many years to come, and to be fair, the agency really needs it to keep working. With the incredible delays and cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope (thanks to the repeated shortcomings and incompetence of contractor Northrop Grumman), NASA is heavily dependent on Hubble. Let’s hope all the issues that arise can be resolved.

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