The Hubble Space Telescope went into safe mode on Friday, when the failure of one of its gyroscopes, and the reduced performance of another, put it on hiatus while NASA troubleshoots.
Though the space shuttle has been retired, no servicing missions are planned and no Hubble replacement parts have been developed, NASA officials told Laboratory Equipment magazine the space telescope is expected to still achieve the vast majority of observations, no matter whether ground control can get the gyro with the “anomaly” back to full working order.
The telescope, in low orbit around the Earth since its launch in 1990, was last outfitted with six new gyros in a servicing mission in 2009, according to NASA.
Hubble usually functions with three gyros, and before last week two of the standard gyros had failed (three of the six are standard, and three are enhanced, according to NASA spokespersons).
One of the standard gyros failed, making all three of the standard variety unusable, according to the space agency.
That left three of the enhanced gyros—but one of those that had been used as a backup showed “an anomaly in its rate output” preventing it from being used to point the telescope, according to Felicia Chou, a NASA spokeswoman.
The average life of the standard gyro is 43,000 hours of operation—although one of the enhanced gyros aboard the satellite has clocked 92,000 hours. The enhanced gyros are estimated to last around 14 years. None of them have yet failed.
If ground control can again get the third enhanced gyro to assume normal operations, the science operations will resume in a standard triple-gyro fashion.
If Hubble reverts to just a single gyro, the vast majority of operations will be still possible, albeit with some more difficulty. Overall, observing efficiency would decrease between 10 and 15 percent, according to NASA. Scheduling far ahead, and delaying months to target certain parts of the sky, would be necessary. Scanning across targets would become more challenging, and tracking fast-moving objects such as comets could in some cases become impossible.
Hubble has had its fair share of dramatic turns in its 28-year history. Though the funding was originally approved by Congress in the 1970s, it was launched in 1990—and a flaw in its primary mirror made its images blurry for the first three years of operation. Repairs redeemed the project.
The Hubble has proven enough of a success that it has inspired a follow up. The James Webb Space Telescope was delayed early this year, but now has a scheduled launch for 2020, NASA says
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