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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has delivered its first images since the telescope’s payload computer suddenly shut down on June 13.
The images show a galaxy with what the agency calls “extended spiral arms” and said in a statement it was the first high-resolution look at a pair of colliding galaxies.
NASA COMPLETES TESTS TO IDENTIFY ISSUE WITH HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE COMPUTER
The photos were taken by a program led by Julianne Dalcanton at the University of Washington.
Other potential targets for the program included globular star clusters and auroras on Jupiter.
Scientific observations restarted on July 17, after the telescope’s main computer failed to receive a signal from the payload computer and then put Hubble’s science instruments into safe mode.
NASA mission analysts, working from the Greenbelt, Maryland, mission control at Goddard Space Flight Center in addition to the remote control, and engineers worked together to analyze the problem and determine its cause.
The HST has been orbiting approximately 340 miles above Earth for over 30 years. The telescope was built in the 1980s and NASA said the former Hubble students had returned to help with the recovery effort.
The team looked at 40-year-old documents, hoping to diagnose the problem quickly.
Nzinga Tull, manager of Hubble Systems Anomaly Response at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Works in the control room July 15 to restore Hubble to full science operations.
(Credit: NASA GSFC / Rebecca Roth)
While examining the potential for a degrading memory module, NASA switched to backup modules.
Next, the team turned on the Hubble payload backup computer for the first time in space. Both tasks failed to resolve the issue.
Then reviewing other hardware – like the SCU / Data Trainer and Power Control Unit – and switching to backups took 15 hours of controlling the spacecraft.
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The main computer was turned off and a “safe mode standby computer” temporarily took control of the spacecraft, several boxes had to be powered for the first time, and the necessary hardware interfaces were switched.
More than 50 people worked on the switch to backup hardware, testing the procedures on a high fidelity simulator and conducting a formal review of the proposed plan.
The team also analyzed data from previous tests and identified the power control unit as the potential source of their concerns.
July 15, 2021 – NASA begins to switch to backing up spacecraft hardware Today, NASA began switching to backing up spacecraft hardware on Hubble in response to a persistent issue with its payload computer.
(Credit: NASA / Goddard / Rebecca Roth)
Passing over to the emergency side of the Scientific Instrumentation and Control and Data Management Unit and the Emergency Power Control Unit, NASA succeeded on July 15 at 11:30 p.m. ET.
“I am delighted to see that Hubble’s eyes are once again on the universe, once again capturing the kind of images that have intrigued and inspired us for decades,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “This is the time to celebrate the success of a truly mission-driven team. Through their efforts, Hubble will continue its 32nd year of discovery and we will continue to learn from the observatory’s transformational vision.”
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The HST has made more than 1.5 million observations of the universe during its lifetime, contributing to some of the most important discoveries in the cosmos.
Most observations missed while scientific operations were interrupted will be rescheduled.
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