The Hubble telescope goes into safe mode.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON — The American Space Agency (NASA) is studying a fault that prevented instruments on its space observatory from functioning. Reported from Space, Wednesday (3/11), on October 25, science instruments on the Space Telescope Hubble enter safe mode.
In a longer statement posted Monday, NASA provided additional details about the error and the agency’s plans to determine and address the cause of returning the observatory to normal operation.
“NASA continues to investigate why instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope recently entered a safe mode configuration, suspending science operations,” agency personnel wrote in a full statement.
“The instrument is in good condition and will remain in safe mode while the mission team continues its investigation,” NASA said.
According to the new statement, the instrument offline at 2.38am EDT (06.38 GMT) on October 25th. But NASA also noted something that had never happened before which was that a similar error had occurred two days earlier but was resolved quickly.
“Hubble’s science instruments issued an error code at 1:46 p.m. EDT 23 October, indicating the disappearance of certain sync messages,” the statement said.
“This message provides information about the time the instrument took to properly respond to data requests and commands. The mission team reset the instruments to resume science operations the next morning.”
The statement notes reveal when the problem recurs, the error code indicates some loss of sync messages and the science instrument follows programming to automatically put itself into safe mode.
According to the statement, Hubble personnel on the ground are continuing to analyze the spacecraft’s data and are also working on procedures that will yield more data to study. The work will take at least a week to complete.
Problems experienced Hubble telescope this doesn’t appear to be more serious than a computer glitch Hubble experienced a few months ago that affected the entire observatory. At that time, the Hubble telescope had to take a break for more than a month and required the team to switch Hubble to its spare hardware.
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