He is back! NASA completes restoration of the Hubble telescope

After 42 days with his scientific instruments in safety mode, the Hubble Space Telescope is fully operational again. according to NASAOn Monday (6) the team in charge of the observatory was able to recover the spectrograph, the only instrument that still needs to be reconnected to the Internet.

“The team will continue to work on developing and testing hardware software changes that would allow them to perform scientific operations, even if they encounter many missing synchronization messages in the future,” the agency said in a statement published on Tuesday (7). .

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On October 25, Hubble experienced a failure to synchronize its internal communications. This left all of his science instruments out of order and rendered him temporarily inoperable.

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When the first instrument, the Advanced Search Camera (ACS), was recovered on November 7, science telescope operations could resume, even with the other instruments remaining in “safe mode.”

Then came the turn of the equipment most used by Hubble, the Wide Field Camera 3 (Wide Field Camera, literally translated), retrieved on the twenty-first, followed by the spectroscopy of the cosmic origins.

The Hubble Telescope will be enhanced by its space research: James Webb

According to NASA, the Hubble team will continue to work to prevent problems from happening again, and the first step in that direction will be a software update scheduled for installation later this month on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. The agency claims that, just like this, all the scientific instruments in the telescope will be modernized.

The Hubble telescope in space will soon be joined by another powerful telescope, James Webb Space TelescopeIt is a collaboration between NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency. Webb monitors infrared radiation so you can make unique observations that complement Hubble’s research.

“With the launch of the Webb Telescope planned for late December, NASA hopes that the two observatories will work together in this decade, expanding our knowledge of the universe even further,” agency officials said.

Hubble last spent 33 days in safe mode

Just over five months ago, Hubble remained in safe mode for 33 days. At that time, the observatory would have had “dead for good‘, which (fortunately) was not the case. The problems were in the Standby Power Control Unit (PCU) and also in the Scientific Data Coordination/Standby Command Unit (CU/SDF) on the other side of the Scientific Instrument and Command and Data Processing Unit (SI C&DH). )) While the PCU distributes power to the SI C&DH components, the CU/SDF sends and coordinates commands and data.

The last problem, which was completely resolved this week, began on October 23, but the mission team was able to reset the devices and resume scientific operations the next morning. However, hours later, the scientific devices again issued error codes, indicating the loss of multiple sync messages. As a result, they independently entered safe mode states as scheduled.

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