NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed colliding galaxies after recovering from mysterious month-long problem

The Hubble Space Telescope is back, and NASA has the pictures to prove it.

The Earth-orbiting observatory went offline on June 13 and stayed that way for over a month as engineers struggled to identify a mysterious problem. NASA has still not announced the exact cause of the problem, but the agency’s engineers were able to bring Hubble back online by activating some of its backup hardware on Thursday.

“I was pretty worried,” NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in a Friday video interview with Nzinga Tull, who led the Hubble team throughout the troubleshooting. “We all knew it was riskier than usual.”

Hubble slowly restarted its science instruments over the weekend and performed system checks to make sure everything was still working. Then he took his first images since the start of the whole debacle.

The telescope focused its lens on an unusual set of galaxies on Saturday. One of his new images shows a pair of slowly colliding galaxies. The other image shows a spiral galaxy with long outstretched arms. Most spiral galaxies have an even number of arms, but this one has only three.

Hubble also observes Jupiter’s northern and northern lights, as well as tight clusters of stars. NASA has yet to share images of these sightings.

“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, in a press release. “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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A mysterious problem that took a month to fix

Hubble, the world’s most powerful space telescope, was put into orbit in 1990. It has photographed the births and deaths of stars, spotted new moons surrounding Pluto, and tracked two interstellar objects passing through our solar system. His observations allowed astronomers to calculate the age and expansion of the universe and to observe the galaxies formed soon after the Big Bang.

But the telescope’s payload computer suddenly stopped working on June 13. This computer, built in the 1980s, is like Hubble’s brain – it controls and monitors all of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments. Engineers have tried and failed to bring it back online several times. Eventually, after running more diagnostic tests, they realized that the computer wasn’t the problem at all – other hardware on the spacecraft was causing the shutdown.

It’s still not entirely clear which piece of hardware was the culprit. Engineers suspect that a fail-safe on the telescope’s power control unit (PCU) has ordered the payload computer to shut down. The PCU might have sent the wrong voltage of electricity to the computer, or the failsafe itself might have malfunctioned.

NASA was prepared for problems like this. Each piece of Hubble’s hardware has a twin pre-installed on the telescope in case of failure. The engineers therefore transferred all the defective parts to this backup material. Now the telescope is back in full observation mode.

“I feel super excited and relieved,” Tull said after making the change of gear. “I’m glad I have good news to share.”

Although NASA has corrected the problem, it is a sign that the age of Hubble could start to interfere with its science. The telescope has not been upgraded since 2009, and some of its hardware is over 30 years old.

“It’s an older machine, and it tells us, look, I’m getting a little bit old here, isn’t it? It speaks to us,” Zurbuchen said on Friday. “Despite this, more science is to come, and we are excited about it.”

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