NASA Hubble Space Telescope Now 'Partially' Fine After Glitch; Shares Photo of Cosmic Gas Ribbon

NASA engineers have successfully restored the Advanced Camera for Surveys nearly two weeks after the Hubble Space Telescope went dark. However, the other equipment on board the flying observatory remains inoperable, and NASA experts are currently working to resolve the issue.

While Hubble has yet to return to regular operations, there are hints that things are improving. The telescope groggily recorded a vivid cosmic gas ribbon from the debris of a supernova.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Now Groggily Wakes Up From Safe Mode

NASA said the Hubble crew successfully recovered the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) equipment on November 7. The instrument has resumed scientific observations since its recovery.

Screen Rant, citing NASA, said the team found "no new problems" with the Hubble Space Telescope apart from the synchronization concerns. The Hubble crew will continue to explore "short-term options" this week before choosing how to retrieve the remaining equipment and restart normal operations, according to the statement. There isn't any more news on this issue at the moment. Still, the successful repair of the Advanced Camera for Surveys implies that more positive news is on the way in the next days and weeks.

In a recent Science Times story, the space agency noted that they had to take different processes to analyze the Hubble sensors. After a data problem on October 25, the telescope's science equipment switched into safe mode, revealing many code errors. The Hubble crew advised the public that they were concentrating their efforts on determining the cause of the instrument's command hardware failure.

ACS was designed to examine large regions of the sky at visible and red wavelengths with ten times the efficiency of Hubble's sensor, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. (WFPC2). Furthermore, because it has the fewest complications in the case of a lost transmission, ACS was picked as the first instrument to be retrieved.

Hubble Captures Giant Star Explosion

After NASA temporarily repaired Hubble, the observatory witnessed a gigantic star explosion, leaving the DEM L249 cosmic gas ribbon behind. NASA believes the star is debris of a Type 1a supernova, which comes when a white dwarf star dies.

Schools Observatory said Type 1a Supernovae are thermonuclear explosions that involve a binary or double-star system. One star is a white dwarf, and the other is a large red giant star, such as the Sun.

White dwarfs are dense stars that contain a lot of stuff. Despite possessing masses equivalent to the Sun, they have a volume similar to that of the Earth. This suggests they have a strong gravitational field capable of dragging debris from a neighboring star onto their surface.

The mass of the white dwarfs gradually rises as it absorbs more material from its partner in a process known as accretion before exploding later.

DEM L249 is also a one-of-a-kind supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It's in the constellation Mensa, and it's around 160,000 light-years away.

Astronomers discovered that its plasma was hotter and shined brighter in X-rays than the remnant of a normal Type 1a supernova using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton.

Because larger stars produce more gas, astronomers assumed that DEM L249's white dwarf star was more massive than predicted. They also speculated that it perished at a young age.

The picture of DEM L249 was acquired by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope while searching for surviving companions of white dwarf stars that have gone supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

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