Hubble Telescope Successfully Passed Critical Period, Now Back To Normal Operation

NASA's Hubble Telescope has made it through a coma. (photo: doc. NASA)

JAKARTA - NASA's Hubble Telescope has successfully passed a coma since experiencing a system failure at the end of last October. Now, NASA has announced that the space telescope is back in operation.

Hubble is known to have experienced several instrument sync failures that required the telescope to enter safe mode, NASA says the telescope is now functioning as normal, with all four instruments active to collect data.

However, some changes will be made to Hubble. Earlier on October 23, NASA first noticed that the Hubble instrument was not receiving a synchronization message from the telescope's control unit. Then, the communication problems continued for a few days.

This made NASA put the telescope into safe mode, it took a long time to activate due to the sensitivity of Hubble's hardware, especially rapid changes in power or temperature not good for its lifetime.

However, the Hubble team has not detected any further sync message issues since monitoring began November 1. They will continue to work on developing and testing changes to the instrument software that will allow the team to perform science operations, even if they discover some missing sync messages in the future.

These first changes are scheduled to be installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in mid-December. Other instruments will receive similar updates in the coming months.

For your information, Hubble has been operating for more than 31 years, gathering groundbreaking scientific observations to change our fundamental understanding of the universe.

With the launch of the Webb Telescope planned for later this month, NASA expects the two observatories to work well together well into this decade, expanding human knowledge of the cosmos even further.