Hubble Space Telescope Captures Brilliant Star Cluster Despite Being in Safe Mode

NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has once again amazed scientists when it captured a brilliant star cluster just in time for July 4, the day when the United States celebrate their Independence Day.

Hubble Space Telescope Sees Bright Colorful Stars

According to NASA, the image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is of the star cluster NGC 330 that is located 800,000 light-years away from Earth inside the Small Magellanic Cloud, NASA said in a statement. The star cluster NGC330 is in this constellation Tucana and contains a large number of stars that are scattered across the image taken by Hubble.

All the stars in star clusters have roughly the same age as they come from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust. Scientists use them to learn more about stars, especially how they form and evolve.

The image of the star cluster NGC 330 was created using the observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and data from two astronomical investigations. The first one was aimed at understanding the evolution of star clusters, and the second one aimed to determine how large stars can be before they reach their end in a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope always show new things about the universe and adds to the growing data about the cosmos. However, this image also contains clues to the inner workings of the space telescope.

NASA pointed out that the crisscross patterns seen in the image that surrounds the stars are called diffraction spikes. They are formed when starlight interacted with the four thin vanes that support the second mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble Space Telescope Update

After weeks of being offline, the Hubble Space Telescope team is still troubleshooting a problem in its payload computer that controls its science instruments, CNet reported. Unfortunately, these efforts have not worked.

A few days after the Hubble first went offline, NASA said that the troubleshooting team is investigating whether the degrading memory module may have led to the glitch in the computer. Since then, the space telescope was stuck in safe mode.

Then in a June 18 update, NASA said that they did not find any problem within the Hubble and its science instruments. Then on June 22, the space agency announced that the memory issue might be a symptom of a problem with different computer hardware. They ran additional tests, like turning on the backup computer for the first time since it was installed in 2009.

However, on June 25, NASA announced that the backup payload computer also experienced the same error that affected its commands to write into or read from memory.

As they continue to unravel the mystery that caused the Hubble to go offline, NASA prepares for more complex and riskier troubleshooting next week. They are eyeing the power regulator and the hardware that sends formats commands and data. The procedure will be tested first in a simulation with a real telescope.

RELATED ARTICLE: Hubble Space Telescope Still Broken: Reason for Being Offline Remains a Mystery to NASA

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