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NASA has released two stunning new images taken by Hubble after the legendary telescope was taken offline for a month.
Originally launched in April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured over a million images, including detailed photos of the birth and death of stars, of galaxies billions of light years away. and even comets colliding with Jupiter. Effectively making the discoveries made by the device virtually endless.
After operating continuously for 31 years, it seemed like Hubble’s time was drawing to a close. Last month – June 13, 2021 – NASA reported that Hubble was offline due to an issue with its payload computer, and the research team spent the following weeks trying to find a fix. Fortunately, on July 16, 2021, Hubble was brought back online. According to NASA, the team was able to restore the functioning of the space telescope by redirecting all of Hubble’s operations to a backup computer.
The switch included bringing online the backup Power Control Unit (PCU) and the backup Scientific Data Trainer / Control Unit (CU / SDF) on the other side of the unit. Science Instrument and Command & Data Handling (SI C&DH). The PCU distributes power to the SI C&DH components, and the CU / SDF sends and formats commands and data. In addition, other hardware elements onboard Hubble have been switched to their alternate interfaces to connect to this backup side of the C&DH IS. Once these steps were completed, the standby payload computer on that same unit was powered on and loaded with flight software and put into normal operating mode.
The Hubble team is now monitoring the hardware to make sure everything is working properly. The team also initiated the process of recovering scientific instruments out of their safe mode configuration. This activity should take more than a day as the team performs various procedures and ensures that the instruments are at stable temperatures. The team will then perform an initial calibration of the instruments before resuming normal scientific operations.
According to the NASA statement, the first snapshots below – beautiful images of two galaxies – demonstrate Hubble’s return to full science operations, after a computer anomaly was fixed on board the spacecraft. These two photos of particular galaxies are part of a program led by Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, to study strange galaxies scattered across the sky.
ARP-MADORE2115-273 is a pair of colliding galaxies rarely seen in the southern hemisphere. These Hubble observations provide Hubble’s first high-resolution insight into this intriguing system. ARP-MADORE0002-503 is a large spiral galaxy with unusual extended spiral arms, at a distance of 490 million light years. Its arms extend over a radius of 163,000 light years, making it three times the size of the Milky Way.
While the fact that the telescope is back in action is great news, it’s unclear how well the backup computer onboard Hubble will be able to perform in the months or years to come. At the time of publication, it appears to be performing as expected and NASA appears confident in its current condition.
“The volume of record science that Hubble has delivered is astounding,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Missions Directorate. “We have so much to learn from this next chapter in Hubble’s life – alone and with the capabilities of other NASA observatories. I couldn’t be more excited about what the Hubble team has achieved over the past few weeks. They have faced the challenges of this process head-on, ensuring that Hubble’s days of exploration are far from over.
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