Hubble Space Telescope Should Last At Least 5 More Years - Geek

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope isn’t letting some broken parts slow it down.

A new reports suggests the spacecraft has a “strong chance” of lasting at least another five years, through the mid-2020s.

“Right now, all of the subsystems and the instruments have a reliability exceeding 80 percent through 2025,” mission head Thomas Brown, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, told Space.com.

Brown presented the results last week, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

The positive diagnosis comes a week after engineers suspended operations of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 due to an unspecified hardware problem.

Team members have since attributed the glitch to a telemetry issue, rather than a power-supply problem—in which case, a simple turn-it-off-and-on-again solution brought the WFC3 back into operation.

“All values were normal. Additional calibration and tests will be run over the next 48 to 72 hours to ensure that the instrument is operating properly,” NASA announced on Tuesday.

“Assuming that all tests work as planned, it is expected that the Wide Field Camera 3 will start to collect science images again by the end of the week,” according to a blog post.

WFC3 was installed during the last servicing mission to Hubble in 2009, when astronauts also introduced the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. After a decade in space, both instruments still have their backup systems online, which could help extend their lifetimes.

“If the redundancy systems are [as] reliable [as the primaries], we can still get plenty of years out of them as well,” Brown said.

The Hubble Space Telescope, meanwhile, is in its 29th year—well surpassing the original 15-year lifespan.

Since the iconic spacecraft’s launch into low Earth orbit in 1990, five Space Shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded, and replaced its systems, including all five main instruments.

Hubble’s orbit is stable until the 2030s, at which point it will crash into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up before touching the ground. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for liftoff in March 2021, will eventually replace the Hubble.

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