NASA is working quickly to repair the Hubble Space Telescope after a problem with an on-board computer in the 1980s caused the famous Orbiting Observatory to shut down temporarily.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which in 2020 celebrated its 30th year in orbit, stopped working Sunday, June 13 after 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) after problems emerged with one of the telescope’s computers in the 1980s. The Hubble operations team suspects the problem may be due to a degraded memory module, according to a NASA statement. The team is working hard to try to correct the problem, switching to one of the telescope’s many backup units.
“Assuming this problem is corrected by one of the many options available to the operations team, Hubble should continue to make amazing discoveries until the end of 2020 or beyond,” said 45 seconds. From the operations team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. in a letter. They added, however, that “there is no set timetable yet as to when this will be completed, tested and brought back to operational condition.”
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On Sunday, the telescope’s main computer stopped receiving signals from the payload computer and sent an error message to the ground system on Earth, which alerted the operations team that something was wrong. The team said.
“The analysis indicates that the error is most likely due to a deteriorating memory problem. Memory can deteriorate over time due to years of radiation exposure in space. Such issues are expected, which is why there are spare memory modules on the spacecraft,” they added.
The computer that malfunctioned on Sunday is a laptop that controls the observatory’s science instruments as part of the Scientific Instruments and Telescope Console and Data Management. The unit was last replaced during the last astronauts’ maintenance mission to the observatory in 2009. The computer is a standard NASA Spacecraft System 1 (NSSC-1) built in the 1980s.
The computer payload dates back to the 1980s when Hubble was designed and built. Like all spacecraft devices, the harsh space environment can have a negative impact on electronics. That’s why there are spare memory modules and a payload backup computer on board the spacecraft that we can switch to if needed,” members of the operations team wrote in the email.
After the telescope shut down on Sunday, Hubble’s main computer automatically put all of its instruments into safe mode, and on Monday, June 14, members of NASA’s Goddard team restarted the payload computer that caused the shutdown. However, after the restart, the computer ran into the same issues that caused the initial shutdown.
The operations team is “currently changing the memory modules on board the spacecraft,” the team said. Once this process is complete and the vehicle has been thoroughly tested, it will resume normal operations.
This isn’t the first time Hubble has encountered issues that need to be addressed. Early in the telescope’s life, scientists discovered a fault in the observatory’s steering control system and problems with the shape of its primary mirror.
The telescope’s first operational maintenance mission was launched in 1993, and missions to Hubble continued during NASA’s Space Shuttle program. On these missions, the astronauts worked on many issues, including replacing the batteries and gyroscopes that allowed the Hubble telescope to point regularly to distant places in the universe.
Hubble has also overcome problems recently. Back in March, for example, the telescope entered preemptive “safe mode” after experiencing an apparent software glitch, but bounced back after a few days.
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