[ad_1]
The Hubble Space Telescope is back.
The iconic application field resumed normal operations on Friday (Oct. 26) after a three-week hiatus due to problems with two tilt gyroscopes, NASA officials said in an update Saturday (October) 27).
Hubble's first scientific work, which ended Saturday morning, consisted of observing the star-shaped galaxy DSF2237B-1-IR in infrared with the instrument Wide Field Camera 3, added NASA officials. [The Hubble Space Telescope’s Most Amazing Discoveries]
Hubble's problems began on October 5, when a failure of the gyro sent the telescope into secure protection mode. Mission team members worked to recruit a backup gyroscope, but struggled to do so, as the gyro returned abnormal readings, including higher rotational rates than actual ones.
Numerous maneuvers, or turns, and tilted the gyroscope between different operational modes, eliminating what was supposed to be a blockage between the gyro components that produced excessively high throughput values. , NASA officials wrote in Saturday's update.
and monitoring showed that the gyroscope was operating normally, so the mission team delivered Hubble online.
Hubble has A total of six gyroscopes, three of which must be functional in order for the range to operate at maximum efficiency Two Hubble gyroscopes having already been destroyed, the October 5 failure has eliminated the margin of error of the telescope.
But that does not mean that repairing the auxiliary gyro was a question of life or death for Hubble.The telescope can still make good observations in one or two gyroscope mode, o NASA officials said. Had the back-up system continued to behave in an erroneous manner, the mission team would probably have gone into a gyroscopic mode, the other gyroscope being in reserve.
Hubble, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched for Earth Orbit in April 1990 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. The first images of the telescope were fuzzy because of a slight defect in its main mirror, a problem that astronauts navigating in space had resolved in December 1993.
The astronauts then repaired and improved Hubble as part of four other maintenance missions. The last of them, in May 2009, concerned the replacement of the six gyroscopes.
A gyroscope problem also recently set NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory off the ground, launched in 1999. But Chandra bounced back last Sunday (Oct. 21), after his managers had established a new gyroscope configuration.
Copyright 2018 Space.com, a future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
Source link
