Nasa traces Hubble glitches
2008-10-24 12:00
Maggie Fox
Washington - Nasa engineers have traced
two glitches that shut down the orbiting Hubble space telescope
and said on Thursday they rebooted one of the computers
involved.
If all goes well, the telescope should resume some
operations on Saturday and then more next week, Nasa officials
told reporters.
"Observations with the wide field camera will resume this
weekend," Art Whipple of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in
Greenbelt, Maryland, told a telephone briefing.
The computer breakdown forced Nasa to delay its final
Hubble servicing mission, originally scheduled to take off last
week, until February at the soonest.
The space telescope, which orbits about 485km
above Earth, has transformed the view of the Universe,
providing pictures of stars being born, evidence of mysterious
dark energy and peering back to the earliest galaxies.
Back-up has been sleeping since 1990
The computer that failed helped transmit these images back
to Earth, forcing Nasa to use a back-up that had been sleeping
since Hubble was launched in 1990.
"This is the first time we have turned it on in 18 years
and we will have to see how it goes," Whipple said.
One of the problems was caused by a timing error in a
software test, while the other appears to have been electrical
in nature, Nasa said.
"Events of these kinds are not uncommon in electrical
components that have been powered off for a time," Whipple
said, and added that further glitches might be expected.
Nasa will decide in mid-November whether the original
faulty system will be replaced during the next servicing
mission.
The hope is to keep the observatory operating for at
least five more years, and enhance its instruments.
- Reuters