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After a month of frantic tinkering, NASA said on Friday that its aging Hubble Space Telescope was on the mend, recovering from a computer glitch that crippled what many astronomers call the most productive science instrument ever built.
As the bus-sized observatory circled the earth, space agency engineers worked by remote control to switch Hubble from its vintage electronics to backup hardware. In the final step, they powered a payload computer that restored control to its six cameras and sensors, which look through wavelengths of visible, infrared and ultraviolet light to the edge of space. and at the dawn of time.
“We are absolutely delighted that the observatory is back up and running,” said Kenneth Sembach, director of the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Hubble’s science operations. “Everything indicates that everything is going well and we will resume science this weekend. “
In more than a million mind-blowing images of the universe taken over the past 31 years, the solar-powered telescope has presented astronomers and amateur astronomers with a psychedelic tapestry of young stars, dying supernovae, colliding galaxies, gigantic clouds of stellar dust. , dark matter and black holes feasting on spiral nebulae.
Hubble’s data has been used in more than 18,000 scientific papers that have documented the accelerating expansion of the universe, the evolution of galaxies, and studies of planets beyond our solar system, said researchers. NASA officials.
“I think there is a very credible case that the Hubble Space Telescope is the most scientifically productive instrument ever made,” said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA. “Hubble’s peer-reviewed publication output certainly surpasses all of its competitors in any field of science.”
But on June 13, Hubble was hampered – and not for the first time. Technical issues that threatened to end the mission have plagued the telescope since it reached its orbital perch some 340 miles above our planet’s surface on April 25, 1990.
Since its launch in 1990, five space shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded and replaced the telescope’s systems.
Photo:
/ Associated press
Since its launch – with faulty optics making its photos so blurry that the $ 4.7 billion observatory was initially considered an embarrassing failure – five space shuttle missions have repaired, improved and replaced the telescope’s systems . Its five main instruments were repaired, and a set of $ 50 million corrective lenses was installed to remedy its manufacturing flaws.
Last repaired by Space Shuttle astronauts in 2009, Hubble lasted twice as long as initially expected, space agency officials said.
The last problem started when a voltage overload in an on-board payload computer built in the 1980s tripped a circuit breaker and shut down the telescope. It was the most serious technical failure that NASA project engineers have encountered in the 11 years since the shuttle was last repaired.
“We did a lot of debugging,” said James Jeletic, deputy project manager for the Hubble Space Telescope project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After three weeks of careful analysis, they decided to switch the telescope to its remaining backup. systems.
“Everything worked as expected,” Mr. Jeletic said. “The computer came back. All backup hardware is functioning properly. I don’t think we bite our nails anymore.
Write to Robert Lee Hotz at [email protected]
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