Something strange happened to NASA telescopes

Back on April 23, scientists from NASA discovered that two space telescopes, the more famous Hubble, and TESS, which searches for exoplanets, were out of order and went into safe mode. NASA has now reported that on April 29 they were able to restore scientific activities at the Hubble Observatory. But the second observatory still cannot begin work, writes Space.

The Hubble telescope went into safe mode following one of its three gyroscopes began to produce incorrect data, as Focus already wrote. With the help of these instruments, the observatory can precisely target certain objects for observations, and they maintain the correct orientation of the telescope. But why the TESS telescope, which searches for exoplanets (planets outside the solar system) using the transit method (when a planet flies once morest the background of a star, the brightness of the latter decreases and the desired target can be seen) failed, remains a mystery.

Initially, NASA engineers planned for the Hubble telescope to operate with just one gyroscope. But the US space agency said the problem with the critical instrument had been resolved and the observatory was once once more using all three gyroscopes. Now the famous telescope, observing stars and galaxies, has returned to scientific activity once more.

The most interesting thing is that it was with this gyroscope, which recently failed, that problems had already arisen before. For example, the Hubble telescope went into safe mode back in November last year, and only in December did NASA engineers manage to restore its operation.

During the last service and upgrade of the Hubble telescope in 2009, 6 new gyroscopes were installed. They were installed by astronauts who traveled to the observatory on the NASA space shuttle. This was already the fifth modernization of the observatory and since then no similar actions have been carried out or planned. But following 15 years, only 3 gyroscopes remained in working order.

As for the TESS telescope, NASA engineers are trying to understand what caused its failure, which is why it went into safe mode. NASA said it is working to resolve the problem so that TESS can continue its scientific activities.

But that’s not all. The US space agency continues to investigate another TESS outage, which occurred on April 8. It is still not clear what happened then. Interestingly, the telescope exited safe mode on April 17 and then went offline once more on April 23. NASA engineers are trying to figure out whether the two incidents have a common cause, or whether the failure is caused by different problems.

The TESS space telescope completed its main mission back in July 2020. After this, his mission was continued and ended in September 2022. But now the observatory is already operating during another expansion of the main mission.

By the way, April 18 this year marked exactly 6 years since TESS has been searching for planets in our galaxy, and April 24 marks exactly 34 years since the Hubble telescope has been observing space.