The Hubble Telescope is an observatory that flies in space. It was developed by NASA and the European Space Agency to look for the things which exist in Universe and are beyond Earth. the telescope was launched in 1990. Unlike other telescopes on Earth, Hubble which flies in space has the distinctive feature of not being affected by the thick atmosphere of the planet. The atmosphere of the earth tends to distort the view field of telescopes.
For 30 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been giving us breathtaking images from distant corners of the universe. The telescope has imaged over 1.5 million observations since its launch. It has captured stunning and deep subjects like black holes, Nebula, galaxies, etc. Over time, the telescope has been upgraded several times. Upgrading included boosting its capabilities and extending its operational life. According to NASA, over 18,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published on its discoveries, which include tracking interstellar objects as they sailed through our solar system, a comet collision with Jupiter, and discovering the moons around Pluto.
Explaining the features of the telescope, NASA said, “Hubble has peered back into our universe’s distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light-years from Earth, capturing galaxies merging, probing the supermassive black holes that lurk in their depths, and helping us better understand the history of the expanding universe.”
Nearly a decade from its last repair, the telescope, faced the worst computer glitch that shut down science operations. NASA was working really hard to fix it and now it has been finally fixed. The telescope was working in a safe-mode configuration for the last three weeks and was continually flying blind nearly 540 kilometers above Earth. The engineers at NASA had a tough time working on fixing the school bus-sized flying observatory.
NASA prepared a test of procedures that helped them reboot the payload computer that stopped working on June 13 due to a technical glitch pushing all other instruments to work in safe mode configuration. A statement from the Hubble Space Telescope team read, “Nasa completed a test of procedures that were used to switch to backup hardware on Hubble in response to the payload computer problem.”
The faulty payload computer controls and coordinates the science instruments present on the telescope. A sudden halt in the module caused a stoppage of a “keep-alive” signal that the computer receives. The ‘keep-alive signal indicates that all is well. As soon as the fault occurred, the main computer placed all science instruments in a safe-mode configuration.
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As for the records, the telescope was last repaired in 2009 after its deployment by space shuttle Discovery in 1990. In over three decades of its journey above the earth, the telescope did face many technical glitches but they were all repaired in time to resume normal operations. The current glitch took longer than expected for engineers to point out the exact problem. Before 2009, the telescope encountered problems in its Imaging Spectrograph due to power failure in 2004. An electrical short happened in the telescope in 2007. It affected the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) — the primary camera for the telescope.
The engineers were struggling to find the precise problem in the hardware. On the other hand, NASA was quite confident of solving the issue and resuming science operations.