(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA )
Hubble Space Telescope is acting up, and NASA confirms this by announcing that the astronomical observatory has halted its operation. The space agency is already working on fixing the issue.
Hubble Space Telescope Halts Its Operation
NASA declared on Friday that the Hubble Space Telescope has stopped operating due to a mechanical problem. One of the gyroscopes necessary for Hubble to revolve and lock onto new targets malfunctions.
On Tuesday, when one of Hubble's three gyroscopes, or "gyros," short-started returning inaccurate readings, the spacecraft automatically entered "safe mode."
Scientists used Hubble to take pictures from the beginning of time and to determine the first official estimate of the age of the cosmos. NASA engineers are working to resolve the issue, which is temporarily halting operations.
The gyros measure an object's rotational speed, aiding with Hubble's stability and orientation. In each of the telescope's gyros, a wheel within a sealed cylinder rotates 19,200 times per minute.
The cylinder is submerged in a viscous, thick liquid similar to engine oil. Fine wires permeate the fluid, delivering electricity to the motor.
In the past, the thick fluid was forced into the compartment with the wires by compressed air, which may or may not still be the case. This caused the wires to rust and eventually break.
The gyros were last serviced on a space shuttle flight in 2009. Compressed nitrogen was used in place of oxygen in broken gyros on that flight to prevent corrosion.
There are no plans to send more teams to repair Hubble since the space shuttle program ended in 2001 and the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021.
This does not necessarily signal Hubble's demise. NASA said the same gyro also experienced a problem in November, putting Hubble into safe mode.
It occurred when the gyro produced false readings, making it impossible to rely on it to measure Hubble's rotational speed precisely. NASA reported that the telescope's operating crew is trying to devise possible fixes.
If necessary, it can function with just one gyro. The third surviving gyro would then be kept on standby as a backup.
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Hubble Space Telescope Celebrates 34th Anniversary
The Hubble Space Telescope is a revolutionary instrument sent to the low Earth orbit to understand the universe in 1990. Because of its construction, technology, and upkeep, it is among NASA's most revolutionary observatories. Hubble has altered our knowledge of the cosmos, revealing dark energy and the makeup of the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars.
To commemorate the 34th Anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's historic launch on April 24, 1990, researchers captured this image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651.
The nebula consists of two lobes on either side of the ring's entrance and has a ring that is visible as the central bar structure when viewed edge-on.
The photogenic nebula has always been the target of amateur astronomers. When expert astronomers took a spectrum of the object for the first time in 1891, they discovered that it was a nebula rather than a galaxy or star cluster. They proposed that M76 could resemble the donut-shaped Ring Nebula (M57), which can be observed from a side perspective.
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