NASA is working rapidly to repair the Hubble Area Telescope after a difficulty with a Nineteen Eighties-era pc on board brought on the well-known orbiting observatory to quickly shut down.
The Hubble Area Telescope, which in 2020 marked its thirtieth 12 months in orbit, halted operations on Sunday (June 13) simply after 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) after issues arose with one of many telescope’s computer systems from the Nineteen Eighties. The Hubble operations workforce suspects that the difficulty could possibly be attributable to a degrading reminiscence module, in accordance with a NASA assertion. The workforce is tough at work attempting to right the difficulty, switching to one of many telescope’s a number of backup modules.
“Assuming that this downside is corrected through one of many many choices out there to the operations workforce, Hubble is predicted to proceed yielding superb discoveries into the late 2020s or past,” the operations workforce at NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Middle in Maryland informed Area.com in an electronic mail. Nonetheless, “there isn’t a definitive timeline but as to when this can be accomplished, examined and introduced again to operational standing,” they added.
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On Sunday, the telescope’s foremost pc stopped receiving indicators from the payload pc and despatched an error message to the bottom system again on Earth, which alerted the operations workforce that one thing was mistaken, the workforce stated.
“Evaluation signifies the error is probably going attributable to a degraded reminiscence downside. Reminiscence can degrade over time attributable to years of publicity to radiation in area. Points like this are anticipated, which is why there are backup reminiscence modules on the spacecraft,” they added.
The pc that stopped engaged on Sunday is a payload pc that controls the observatory’s science devices as a part of the telescope’s Science Instrument Management and Information Dealing with module. The module was final changed over the last astronaut servicing mission to the observatory in 2009. The payload pc is a NASA Customary Spacecraft Laptop-1 (NSSC-1) system that was constructed within the Nineteen Eighties.
“The payload pc is from the Nineteen Eighties, which is when Hubble was designed and constructed. Like all spacecraft {hardware}, the tough surroundings of area can take its toll on electronics. That’s the reason there are backup reminiscence modules and a backup payload pc onboard the spacecraft that we will change to if wanted,” the operations workforce members wrote within the electronic mail..
After the telescope shut down on Sunday, Hubble’s foremost pc then robotically put all of its devices into protected mode and, on Monday (June 14), workforce members at NASA Goddard restarted the payload pc that brought on the shutdown. Nonetheless, after the restart, the pc bumped into the identical issues that brought on the preliminary shutdown.
The operations workforce is “presently within the strategy of switching reminiscence modules onboard the spacecraft,” the workforce stated. As soon as this course of is full and the craft has been totally examined, it can resume regular operations.
This isn’t the primary time that Hubble has run into issues that wanted fixing. Early within the telescope’s lifetime, scientists discovered an error with the observatory’s pointing-control system and points with the form of its main mirror.
The primary servicing mission was launched to work on the telescope in 1993, and missions to Hubble continued to launch all through NASA’s area shuttle program. On these missions, astronauts labored on many points, together with changing batteries and the gyroscopes that allowed Hubble to level steadily at far-away spots within the cosmos.
Hubble has overcome issues extra lately as effectively. This previous March, for instance, the telescope went right into a protecting “protected mode” after struggling an obvious software program glitch however bounced again a number of days later.
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