NASA’s Hubble Telescope, the distant galaxy viewer, has seemingly faced the worst glitch of its lifetime and is still flying around 540 kms above Earth with all its scientific equipments in safe mode.
On June 13, it went berserk and stopped working unexpectedly. It got noticed when the main computer stopped getting its ping or “keep-alive” signal from the payload one, which indicates a working network.
Initially the engineers suspected a memory module to have gone bad but the anomaly has turned out to be with payload computer, and the resolution is still pending.
Hubble Telescope and the glitch:
Hubble Space Telescope is a giant, space-located observatory, with over 30 years of observing some of the most distant stars, galaxies and planets in our solar system.
Despite the rain clouds, light pollution, and atmospheric distortions, Hubble gets a crystal-clear view because of the new, state-of-the-art scientific instruments added to the telescope during the five astronaut servicing missions, last happened in 2009.
Why Hubble is special?
So far, Hubble has recorded a more than 1.4 million observations during its lifetime.
This could happen as unlike other telescopes having a particular range of operation, Hubble’s extended domain include detections ranging from the ultraviolet through the visible (which our eyes see) to the near-infrared.
Hubble has made our Cosmos reachable and understandable to us by surfing through entities located even beyond 13.4 billion light-years from Earth, unseen and hidden from us.
Hubble has seen it all: interstellar objects lost in our solar system, noticed moons around Pluto, heralded the dusty disks and stellar nurseries throughout the Milky Way evolving into the fully fledged planetary systems etc.
The unconventional Glitch restricting Hubble to explore:
Since the problem surfaced, more than a dozen experts have been troubleshooting to find the culprit.
The team firstly expected thought the Hubble’s main computer to be faulty, but then switching the components to the backup computer didn’t solve the problem, hereby suggesting something other in the heap.
And therefore, adjacent systems interacting with the computer, storing its data and regulating the power supply, had to be checked in too.
Checking these supplementary systems is way riskier and difficult as the Engineers have to check and rule-out more and more pieces making the system.
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And that’s awfully dangerous because: “To swap them out and swap in the redundant components on the other side would require commanding of the spacecraft, which is riskier because if you do something wrong, you’ll leave the spacecraft in an undesirable condition”.
As of June 8, Nasa has successfully finalized a test of procedures that would be used to switch to backup hardware on Hubble so that issue could be isolated, in response to the payload computer problem.
Fortunately, the Hubble telescope carries a backup computer similar to the main unit, that was installed back in 2009 but was never tested in space.
“After performing tests on several of the computer’s memory modules, the results indicate that a different piece of computer hardware may have caused the problem, with the memory errors being only a symptom”, its June 22 statement said.
However, the switch will be made in the upcoming week after further preparations and reviews to avoid risks.
And therefore, with passing time, NASA has slowed down the troubleshooting process. It can endure losing time than a fairly marvelous creation of Human race in the Cosmos.
Okay, why can’t NASA schedule another servicing, now after 2009?
Earlier, crews of astronauts went into Space to repair and upgrade the components each time but something has changed now.
NASA can no longer send these missions to fix the telescope as the Engineers relied on NASA’s very own fleet of space shuttles, that retired way back in 2011.
Why is it being utterly difficult to solve and detect the glitch?
In general, troubleshooting a spacecraft glitch tends to be comparatively difficult since engineers can’t see or touch the systems to detect and test things while having bare minimal data about what’s happening, sitting here on Earth.
NASA’s director of astrophysics explains: “The typical way that one troubleshoots an anomaly is you think about all the things that could have gone wrong, you try to order them in order of likeliness, and then you work your way down the list.”
But NASA seems hopeful: “Other than the fact that this particular anomaly means the observatory can’t work until we solve it, I don’t think solving it is different in kind than other anomalies that NASA deals with”.