Gyroscope again: The Hubble Space Telescope is back in operation after inactivity

The Hubble Space Telescope has ended another forced outage and has resumed operations six days after it automatically shut down in safety mode. The US space agency has now announced this and confirmed that the instrument is in overall good condition. NASA also adds that the space telescope continues to use its three gyroscopes to determine its direction. One of them repeatedly delivered incorrect values, leading to a recent shutdown. NASA wrote that all of the device's scientific instruments are now back in use and scientific data is being collected again.

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Always problems

The fact that the space telescope stopped working again NASA announced last weekend. The device has already switched to safety mode on April 23. According to NASA, the incorrect values ​​that caused this came from the same gyroscope that was responsible for the Hubble failure that lasted several weeks in mid-November. NASA officials are still searching for a solution and don't want to do without the component for now. However, if the errors cannot be resolved, the Hubble Space Telescope can also be operated with a single gyroscope if necessary. This will then perform the exact alignment after it is roughly aligned elsewhere.

Hubble was launched into space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990. It became clear from the beginning that the instrument's 2.4-meter primary mirror was so flawed that it did not provide much better image quality than ground-based telescopes. An overhaul of the Space Shuttle Endeavor followed in 1993, and four more maintenance missions were added by 2009. In the latter, six new gyroscopes were installed in order to precisely align the instrument with research objects. Three of them have failed now, and the rest are still working. In recent years, technical problems with the revolutionary tool have increased and demonstrated just how advanced this technology is.

(meh)