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The Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's satellite jewel of heaven, is temporarily out of order. On Friday, the telescope ceased to observe and went into "safe mode" after the death of one of its gyroscopes, which direct it to objects of scientific interest.
NASA has appointed a review committee to study the problem of the gyroscope. The telescope carries a total of six gyroscopes, but only three are needed to operate the telescope. The others serve as backups.
During the early years of Hubble, gyroscopes often died and their replacement was one of the main tasks of the service missions. During the last and last maintenance mission, in May 2009, the astronauts installed six new gyroscopes. Two of them have since died, leaving a backup and three gyroscopes in working order, one of which expired on Friday.
But when the ground controllers tried to put the emergency gyroscope on line, he behaved erratically, sending confusing messages to the ground, said Ken Sembach, director of Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope.
The instrument may have to be restarted, said Dr. Sembach in a brief telephone interview on Monday. But, he added, "we do not want to start flipping switches before we understand what's going on."
Mr Sembach said the review committee would need at least a few days to reach a conclusion. Hubble can work with only two gyroscopes if needed, as was the case from 2005 to 2009 until the astronauts come to fix it. Even a gyroscope will suffice.
The flow of celestial cosmic postcards has stopped for the moment, but Dr. Sembach said Hubble still had years of good science ahead of him.
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