NASA's Hubble may have only just been fixed recently, but according to space news reports, the space agency is not wasting time, putting the space telescope to work and showing its distant galaxies' latest images.
"It was a nail-biting month," of unforeseen downtime for Hubble, according to a SlashGear report, after observations came to a sudden stop in mid-June when the payload computer which is managing the telescope shut down.
Given the said space telescope is now over 30 years old, it is expected to experience grumbles and glitches. Still, the team accountable for managing the telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were left with a difficult challenge to solve, given in-person fixes to Hubble are said to be "out of the question."
Instead, the team figured out a complicated switchover to a backup computer onboard, with the dangerous movement carried out on Friday.
Such a maneuver sent smoothly, and by Saturday, NASA's Hubble was back, capturing unprecedented images of neighboring galaxies.
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Captured Images
Commenting on Hubble's return to service, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he is thrilled to see that the telescope has its eye back on the universe, once again taking shots of the kind of images that have "intrigued and inspired us for decades."
This, he added, is a moment of celebrating the success of a team truly dedicated to the mission. Through the team's efforts, he continued, Hubble will is continuing its 32nd year of discovery and is continuing to learn from the transformational vision of the observatory.
As for what the space telescope turned its observations to, with the scheduled jobs from the previous month now being pushed back on the itinerary, it was a pair of extraordinary spiral galaxies that were top of the list of things to do.
One of the captured images shows two interacting galaxies in the southern hemisphere, an infrequently observed configuration.
The other image, on the other hand, shows another spiral galaxy, although which has both extended spiral arms and three of them, both infrequencies.
The capture images were topics of interest to a program that is run by Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle.
According to NASA, also snapped this weekend by Hubble were globular star clusters and aurorae on Jupiter, also known as the giant planet.
Preparing the James Webb Space Telescope
The team's collective discovery was that the struggle of recommencing scientific work would be a fair degree more difficult compared to just turning the computers of Hubble back on.
Instead of simply throwing a switch to flip to the backup system, the work from Goddard took 15 hours to wake up the replacement computers, not to mention safely segue operations over to them.
Hubble deputy project manager Jim Jeletic at Goddard said the main computer needed to be turned, and a backup safety mode computer took over the spacecraft temporarily.
He explained several boxes needed to be powered on that were never turned on before in space, and other hardware had their interfaces switched.
In the meantime, another NASA team is preparing the James Webb Space Telescope, a new instrument, for its launch later this year.
Described to be more powerful than Hubble and has the capability to observe different wavelengths, it is expected to unlock new understanding into distant galaxies and help understand things like the evolution of a star, the black holes' formation, and other factors instrumental to how the universe is evolving.
Related information about the repair of NASA's Hubble is shown on Anton Petrov's YouTube video below:
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