The Hubble Space Telescope is back! NASA repairs the Great Observatory and puts it back to work

[19659002] The Hubble Space Telescope is one of four large observatories placed in space by NASA NASA

NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had been repaired and that his daily activities were restored.

The space agency issued a statement this weekend in which it explained that Hubble had already resumed his scientific missions and even completed an observation. Five hours after being repaired, Hubble was able. to look into a distant galaxy with his Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.

This was the first time Hubble had made observations since October 5, when he had suffered a failure of one of his six embedded gyroscopes, reports SpaceNews. , NASA has put the probe is in safe mode while the diagnostics are launched. It was found that one of the gyroscopes was displaying much higher rates than it was supposed to display.

Field engineers, says NASA, were able to find a solution to the anomaly. They decided to reduce the number of erroneous readings of the gyroscope 3 by performing a number of maneuvers to eliminate a blockage in the gyroscope. This is a way of saying that they have turned it on and off a few times until it works again.

NASA then announced that the gyroscope was starting to issue normal readings on Oct. 22 and that they also performed additional tests to make sure the problem was solved. After about 4 days of testing, by October 26, a number of tests including maneuvers that Hubble should perform during a mission have also been successful.

"Hubble has completed maneuvers for the first scientific observations have been targeted, and the telescope has collected its first scientific data since October 5," NASA said in its statement.

Hubble with three gyroscopes will be able to operate at full speed, says the report. If the third gyroscope had not been repaired, NASA would have been forced to put the telescope into single gyroscope mode, the report notes. This means that even though most of his observation abilities would have been preserved, some features would have been lost.

"We can do Hubble quality science, in a smaller fraction of the sky, when we go into single-gyroscopic mode," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.