[ad_1]
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has resumed normal operations.
NASA has announced that it has completed its first scientific observations on Saturday October 27 at 2:10 EDT.
The observations concerned the star – shaped DSF2237B – 1 – IR distant galaxy and were taken in infrared wavelengths with the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.
The return to science comes after the successful recovery of a backup gyroscope, or gyroscope, which had replaced a failed gyroscope three weeks earlier.
The telescope activated a backup gyroscope after entering safe mode due to a failed gyroscope on Friday, October 5th.
However, the gyroscope began to spin at an alarming speed, so NASA could not re-ignite the riflescope.
To remedy this, NASA has opted for a proven IT support technique: turn it on and off.
The Hubble Operations team turned off the gyroscope for one second and then restarted it before the wheel spins.
They then commanded a series of spacecraft maneuvers, or turns, in opposite directions to try to clear any blockage that could deconcentrate the float and produce extremely high speeds.
During each maneuver, the gyroscope was toggled from high mode to low mode to eliminate any blockage that may have accumulated around the float.
Following the maneuvers of October 18, the team found a significant reduction in high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for short periods.
"The rotational speeds produced by the emergency gyroscope have since been reduced and are now in the expected range," NASA said.
Additional testing will be done to ensure that Hubble can return to scientific operations with this gyroscope.
This is what happens when the Earth's most powerful telescopes begin to show the use of decades of use and may not work completely.
Astronomical observatories such as Hubble and Chandra were launched in orbit years ago and have provided us with breathtaking images and valuable data ever since.
These wonderful machines, which have been valuable for the progress of modern science, are deteriorating with age and NASA has no plan in place to replace this struggling technology.
They have been developed to help map distant galaxies, scan black holes, and locate new planets, but astronomers worry that their eyes in the sky will darken soon.
"The refusal to invest in a substantial science is beginning to worry," said astronaut Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, who operates the telescope at the Washington Post. Hubble on behalf of NASA.
"We are facing a very discouraging prospect as a community. Some fields simply will not have a telescope. And science will not be possible otherwise. "
Funding for the successors of these branded telescopes has not yet been secured and Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said it was a "choice for the nation".
"Our missions will be influenced by the priorities of the community as well as the funding choices made by the political system," he added.
Hubble was launched in 1990 and earlier this month, it malfunctioned, ending its work and being aimed at scientists who are totally dependent on the 28-year-old machine, how much they depend on the technology originally conceived in the 1970s.
The Chandra X-ray telescope has entered its twentieth year of existence and has exceeded its expected operational life of nearly 15 years.
Chandra automatically went into safe mode earlier this month because of a gyro problem.
"The cause of Chandra's safe mode on October 10 has now been understood and the Operations team has managed to bring the probe back to its normal scoring mode," NASA said.
He claimed that the safe mode was caused by a problem in one of Chandra's gyroscopes, which resulted in a three-second period of erroneous data, which led the computer to calculate an incorrect value. for the momentum of the spaceship.
The erroneous moment indication then triggered the safe mode.
"The team has finalized its project to swap gyroscopes and set aside the gyroscope that has experienced this problem," Nasa said.
Hubble went into hibernation because of a similar failure of the gyroscope.
NASA says that the problems with Chandra have now been resolved, but there is little fuel left and it is unclear how long it will remain functional.
The space agency says it's a coincidence that Chandra and Hubble fell asleep one week to the next.
It "continues its work for the resumption of scientific operations of the Hubble Space Telescope after the spacecraft entered safe mode due to a gyroscope failure (gyroscope)."
An astronomer who works on Chandra, Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center, tweeted Friday to announce that "Chandra decided that if Hubble could take a vacation, he wanted some too."
The US political giant provided NASA with significant resources and financial support to launch and sustain the Great Observatory program in the 1970s.
Four telescopes were designed and constructed to measure the full spectrum of gamma ray (Compton Gamma Ray observatory) infrared radiation (Spitzer space telescope).
The other two telescopes in this program – Hubble and Chandra – respectively analyze visible / near ultraviolet light and X-rays.
Between them, they would find and help unravel the mysteries behind the most energetic explosions of the universe, black holes, exoplanets, newborn stars and discovering the age of the universe.
Compton perished in 2001 after a gyroscope number made it useless and Spitzer was expected to die next year.
NASA expects the remaining two telescopes to continue to operate during the 2020s.
"People suddenly realized that Hubble would not live forever," said Tom Brown, Hubble Mission Manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
In the event of Hubble's failure, there will be no visible or ultraviolet telescopes on this scale.
This, says Dr. Brown, leads scientists to wonder what will happen next.
The James Webb telescope will study infrared radiation in space, but delays and errors have caused delays and errors that have delayed the launch date until 2021.
As for the spectrum of visible light, NASA does not plan to replace Chandra and further study the wavelength of light X-rays.
Julie McInery, a gamma-ray astrophysicist and project scientist at Fermi, Compton's youngest successor, said, "You must have a minimum level of activity in a given telescope area to maintain your expertise in the community and be able to continue to build instruments. "
Source link
