The Hubble Space Telescope is experiencing its most serious glitch in a decade, and NASA really wants to fix it

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The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is facing its most serious malfunction in over a decade, and while NASA is eager to restore the iconic observatory, the agency doesn’t want to rush into this overhaul.

On June 13, Hubble unexpectedly stopped doing scientific work in what mission engineers originally suspected was a worsening memory module condition. But the anomaly turns out to be more slippery than that.

Now, more than three weeks later, the NASA team is still working on pinpointing what went wrong with the observatory, which astronauts deployed from the space shuttle Discovery in 1990 and was last fixed in 2009. Although the anomaly was more difficult than Originally expected, however, NASA officials are confident that Hubble has a lot of science up its sleeve.

“Other than the fact that this particular anomaly means the observatory cannot operate until we solve it, I don’t think its solution is qualitatively different from the other anomalies that NASA deals with,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics. Space.com in an interview.

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Hertz noted that troubleshooting spacecraft is always a bit tricky, since engineers can’t see or touch the systems and have minimal data about what’s going on.

“It’s always a little bit of an investigative exercise to try to use the clues we have and understand the hardware and what it can and can’t do and try to figure out what supposed problem could lead to the data we’re seeing,” Hertz said. “The typical way one does troubleshooting is to think of all the things that could have gone wrong, try to rank them in order of similarity, and then work your way down the list.”

In the weeks since this anomaly, he said, more than a dozen experts have worked through that list of potential culprits, which spacecraft troubleshooters call a fishbone. At first, the team expected to find the error in the Hubble telescope’s main computer, but that theory didn’t work — switching to the backup computer didn’t solve the problem. Tests along the way were generally easy to implement.

Now, the fishbone seems to refer instead to neighboring systems that interact with the computer, managing data and power supplies. Examining these systems is riskier and more difficult, Hertz said: Engineers have to work with more parts of the system than they have in previous tests, and they should involve the spacecraft itself, rather than just the computer.

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“To swap them out and replace redundant components on the other side will require driving the spacecraft, which is much more dangerous because if you do something wrong, you will leave the spacecraft in an undesirable state,” Hertz said.

Because of the risks involved in the following procedures, NASA has slowed down the troubleshooting process. “We are intentionally not putting any pressure on the team,” Hertz said. “I told them the goal is to safely restore Hubble science processes, not to do it quickly.”

He said the team took a break for the long weekend of July 4th and is now back to work developing and analyzing procedures for switching to data backup units and power regulators on board the spacecraft. Hertz noted that before any commands are sent to Hubble, the entire plan must be approved by an independent review board and a group of NASA administrators, given the potential for a small mistake to end Hubble science forever.

But while Hertz and the rest of NASA take the current anomaly seriously, he said the case doesn’t mean it’s time to say goodbye to the beloved observatory just yet. “We are all aware that Hubble is getting older,” Hertz said.

“Parts in space don’t fail on schedule, it’s random,” he added. “It’s been 12 years since we’ve served Hubble and one thing has finally failed. So, to put it simply, we’ll have another five, 10, 12 years before something else fails, and it’s probably something that is still redundant. So it wouldn’t be the end of the mission either.” .

Email Megan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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