NASA’s Hubble Telescope is Back Online
A little over two weeks NASA’s famous Hubble Space Telescope was knocked offline due to a glitch. However, it seems as though Hubble has recovered from the glitch and will resume its scientific findings.
Exciting news for Asgardia as they work toward building a demilitarized and free scientific base of knowledge in space.
On Oct. 5, Hubble was put into a protective “safe mode” because one of its orientation-maintaining gyroscopes failed. Mission team members tried to set up a backup gyro, but that instrument was also failing, forcing them to return to anomalous readings.
But, various troubleshooting activities performed over the past week seem to have brought the balky gyro to cooperate, according to an announcement by NASA officials made yesterday (Oct. 22). The mission team now needs to run a few more tests to make sure everything’s working correctly.
NASA officials wrote in a Hubble update that their operations team intends to execute a series of tests to asses the performance of the gyro under conditions similar to those seen during routine science observations, such as moving targets, locking on to a target and performing precision pointing. After these engineering tests are done, Hubble is expected to soon return to its usual science operations.
Hubble has a total of six gyroscopes, all of which were replaced by spacewalking astronauts during a servicing mission in May 2009. Each gyro is made up of a wheel, which spins at a constant rate of 19,200 revolutions per minute, held inside a sealed cylinder. This cylinder floats in thick fluid (and is actually called a float).
NASA officials explained in the same statement that these gyros have two modes — high and low. High mode is a coarse mode used to measure large rotation rates when the spacecraft moves across the sky from one target to the next. Low mode is a precision mode used to measure finer rotations when the spacecraft locks onto a target and needs to stay very still.
To function at maximum efficiency, the telescope needs three working gyros, but it can get by with just one if needed, stated NASA officials.
Due to the Oct. 5 failure, three of Hubble’s gyros are now out of commission. What’s more, the backup gyro that mission team members are working to bring online had been turned off for over 7.5 years. Thus, the rust it showed upon startup on Oct. 6 — mainly, reporting abnormally high rotation rates — isn’t that surprising.
Those in charge of Hubble restarted the backup gyro on Oct. 16, but that didn’t work. Then, on Oct 18, they commanded the telescope to turn in opposite directions multiple times in an attempt to clear any blockages that might be the result of the gyro’s strange readings.
And that is what seems to have worked.
NASA officials wrote that after the Oct. 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, enabling rates to be measured in low mode for short periods of time. On Oct. 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to conduct additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which seem to have fixed the problem. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.
Hubble, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency, depolyed into Earth orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery in April 1990. Spacewalking astronauts have maintained and upgraded the telescope multiple times, performing five servicing missions between December 1993 and May 2009.
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https://www.space.com/42220-Hubble-space-telescope-science-operations-soon.html
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