What Happened to the Hubble Space Telescope? NASA Update on Failed Gyroscope

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has brought us images of distant galaxies, comets breaking up, black holes and more during its time in space. On October 5, NASA was made aware that the craft automatically went into safe mode around 6 p.m. EDT. The craft did so because one of the three gyroscopes on the telescope failed, according to NASA.

When the gyroscope failed, the craft immediately went into safe mode to put the craft in a stable configuration. The gyro that failed was one of those used to point and steady the telescope, according to NASA. Once in safe mode, the ground control can try and diagnose the problem and solve it to get the telescope back up and normally running.

A week after the failure of the gyro, NASA was still working to resume operations on board the Hubble telescope. Part of the delay had to do with the fact that one of the backup gyros, installed with redundancy in mind, also wasn’t functioning properly once it was turned on.

A photo of the Hubble Telescope that went into safety mode October 5 after a gyroscope failed. NASA

That backup gyro was reporting rotation rates that were higher than they should be. So not only was NASA examining the cause of the first gyros failure, but it is also looking into the malfunction of the second one.

What researchers have discovered is that the backup gyro is actually tracking the telescope’s movement correctly but then reporting the rates falsely, according to NASA. The rates that are being reported are too high for the gyro to be able to measure the small movements of the telescope, those measurements of small movements are needed to determine whether the telescope is locked onto a target and remaining still.

Hubble was launched in 1990 out to space from the Discovery space shuttle, since then its undergone several servicing missions to upgrade it, including the installation of extra gyros in 2009.

When Hubble captures images of objects, those objects frequently appear faint and it's imperative that the telescope stay still while capturing such small objects. It’s made 1.3 million observations while in low-Earth orbit, completing one orbit around the Earth every 95 minutes or so, according to NASA.

Those observations and the science operation of the telescope were suspended while NASA was working to discover the anomaly of the gyro and hopefully adjust the operation back to normal. If that is unsuccessful, NASA plans to put the telescope into one gyro operation, which would still allow it to operate for years collecting further science.

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