NSUble will be back in service soon. As the special site space.com underlines, the NASA space telescope is fully operational again after suffering a technical failure that has damaged its scientific instruments since late October. “Hubble is back! The telescope is now operating with four active instruments after a NASA team recovered the STIS camera and spectrometer on Monday, December 6,” the US agency said on Twitter.
“The team will continue to work on developing and testing modifications to the instrument’s software that will allow them to conduct scientific operations,” NASA said in a statement. As a reminder, the Hubble Space Telescope had experienced a problem related to the synchronization of its internal communications. Space.com explains that an anomaly that caused four scientific instruments to be disconnected from the oscilloscope temporarily put the device out of service.
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Hubble joined by another powerful telescope
To prevent this kind of problem from happening again in the future, NASA intends to install a software update on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument from Hubble in mid-December. From 2022, the agency also indicated that it would update its other scientific instruments.
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Once again operational in space, Hubble will soon be joined by another powerful telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the result of a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. This infrared telescope will aim to provide unparalleled observations as a complement to Hubble, which has been in space since 1990, still many bright years ahead of it.