Hubble Space Telescope Nearly Ready for Action Again

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | October 22, 2018 06:33pm ET

It looks like NASA's famous Hubble Space Telescope has recovered from the glitch that knocked the observatory offline more than two weeks ago.

On Oct. 5, Hubble went into a protective "safe mode" after one of its orientation-maintaining gyroscopes failed. Mission team members tried to recruit a backup gyro, but that instrument refused to behave, returning anomalous readings.

However, a number of troubleshooting activities conducted over the past week appear to have brought the balky gyro to heel, NASA officials announced today (Oct. 22). The mission team just needs to run a few more tests to make sure everything's fixed. [The Hubble Space Telescope: A 25th Anniversary Photo Celebration]

"The Hubble operations team plans to execute a series of tests to evaluate the performance of the gyro under conditions similar to those encountered during routine science observations, including moving to targets, locking on to a target and performing precision pointing," NASA officials wrote in a Hubble update. "After these engineering tests have been completed, Hubble is expected to soon return to normal science operations."

More:
https://www.space.com/42220-hubble-space-telescope-science-operations-soon.html

[Canoe52]

1. Yeah! Love the Hubble!

[Javaman]

2. it always impresses the living hell out of me how the scientists are able to do this

over and over again.

like the Apollo 13 Astronauts said, "the PhD's are working hard on this".

[DavidDvorkin]

3. The people working hard on Apollo 13 weren't PhDs

They were engineers with bachelors and masters degrees.

[SCantiGOP]

4. One of America's most expensive toys

And I mean that in a supportive way.