NASA is fighting to fix the computer failure of the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1980s

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 by Space Shuttle Discovery. To avoid distorting the atmosphere, Hubble has an unobstructed view of the planets, stars and galaxies more than 13.4 billion light years away. Credit: NASA

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NASA continues to work on an issue with the Hubble Space Telescope’s payload computer. The operations team will run the tests and collect more information about the system to further isolate the problem. Scientific instruments will stay in Safe Mode until the problem is resolved. The telescope itself and the instruments of science remain in excellent health.

The computer stopped on Sunday June 13th. An attempt to restart the computer on Monday June 14th failed. The first signs of this were that the computer’s memory module had deteriorated when the computer source was stopped. When the operations team tried to switch to a storage backup device, the command to start the backup device failed. Another attempt was made on Thursday night on both modules to obtain further diagnostic information as an attempt is being made again to connect these memory modules online. However, these attempts were unsuccessful.

The payload computer is the NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) from the 1980s, which is housed in the Command and Data Processing Unit of the Science Tool. The purpose of a computer is to control, coordinate, and monitor the tools of science for health and safety purposes. It is completely redundant, as the second computer and its associated hardware are in orbit, to which it can switch in the event of a problem. Both computers can access and use any of four independent memory modules, each of which contains 64K of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) memory. The payload computer uses only one storage unit at a time, while the other three are used as backups.

Hubble was founded in 1990 and has been a major contributor to our understanding of the universe over the past 30 years.

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