NASA restarts Hubble telescope
It was a good news, bad news day for NASA on Thursday as space agency managers announced they had successfully restarted the broken Hubble Space Telescope, while at the same time admitting they won’t be ready to send a repair team to the 18-year-old instrument until May at the earliest.
After reactivating two cameras on the telescope, operators beamed down the first pictures since a glitch shut down the telescope several weeks ago, releasing an image of a pair of interacting galaxies that appear to form the number 10.
The image inspired NASA officials to declare the telescope had scored a “perfect 10” as it got back to work.
The glitch occurred in the 135-pound data-handling unit, which gathers and packages information from the telescope’s five main instruments for delivery to the ground. Engineers spent the past weeks attempting to switch those tasks from the malfunctioning side A of the unit to the redundant side B.
The new pictures were testimony to their success. The images were made with the Wide Field Planetary Camera and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA said it hopes to have the other instruments operating in the next few days.
There was no certainty the switch to side B would work. It had sat idle in space for the past 18 years, while its brother did all the work. But now that it’s operating, NASA’s Hubble manager, Preston Burch, said he feels “very confident” it will continue to work as expected in the coming weeks.
NASA also announced Thursday that a repair mission to Hubble will be delayed one more time. A repair team was all set to depart for Hubble on Oct. 14 to replace faulty gyroscopes and worn batteries when the data-handling unit broke. NASA said then that the repair mission would be delayed until at least February, while engineers took a new data-handling unit out of storage and prepared it for launch.
That unit, it turned out, wasn’t operable. It had been partly disassembled. When it was put back together, it “didn’t handle the commands properly,” Burch said during a news briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Troubleshooting those problems will make it impossible to deliver the new data-handling unit to Kennedy Space Center in Florida before April, Burch said.
“We don’t want to take any chance of bringing a box up there that isn’t going to work 100 percent of the time,” Burch explained.
NASA officials said the ailing telescope should be able to endure the extra wait time without breaking down again. Three of the telescope’s gyroscopes, which keep it properly oriented in space, have failed, leaving the telescope to operate on two. If necessary, NASA said, it could work with just one.