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Our eye on the sky opens
The Hubble Space Telescope. Image: NASA
Astrobots from around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief as they learned that the Hubble Space Telescope was officially back in service.
It all happened on Friday and NASA handed the spacecraft to work this weekend: "The observations concerned the star-shaped DSF2237B-1-IR distant galaxy and were taken in infrared with the wide-field camera . 3 instrument, "he said in a statement.
The return to Hubble's science has demonstrated the success of the many technical steps that the mission team has developed to release a problem gyroscope, commissioned to replace a failed gyroscope.
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When the spacecraft is rotated to aim at a part of the sky, the rotation of the gyroscope measures the rotation rate of the mission controllers.
When one of Hubble's gyroscopes broke down, mission scientists put a rescue disk into service. However, once turned on, the emergency gyro turned too fast.
To solve the problem, NASA performed "reboots in progress" on the gyroscope while making Hubble execute turn maneuvers (yes, the pedants, "turning it off and on again was a little simplification for a title but it was not wrong). . This clarified "what we thought was a blockage between gyroscope components that produced excessively high rate values," NASA wrote.
There will now be a long line of astronomers and physicists eager to make up for the backlog of Hubble missions. But that's not all good news.
On Monday, NASA warned that the Kepler Space Telescope, discoverer of hundreds of exoplanets. The problem is that the telescope is almost out of gas and there is no way to recharge the tanks. ®
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