NASA is about to try a ‘risky’ maneuver to save Hubble, which is still offline

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After a month of scratching, NASA engineers finally thought they’d pinpointed the flaw that destroyed the world’s most powerful space telescope more than a month ago.

The Hubble Space Telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, has taken pictures of the births and deaths of stars, discovered new moons around Pluto, and tracked two interstellar objects as they compressed through our solar system.

His observations allowed astronomers to calculate the age and expansion of the universe and to look at galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang.

But the telescope has been out of business since June 13, when one of its main computers stopped working. NASA engineers have spent the past month running diagnostic tests and analyzing data, and on Wednesday the agency announced that it may have finally traced the problem to a faulty power regulator.

With some confidence that they have located the wrong element, Hubble’s troubleshooters are preparing to switch to backup telescopes on Thursday. That could put her back in her science notes in a few days.

“I think they’ll succeed, but that’s not guaranteed,” Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, told Insider last week.

Hubble hasn’t been upgraded since 2009, and some of its devices are more than 30 years old.

“Could it be that the cause of the problem has something to do with Hubble’s age? The answer is almost certainly yes,” Hertz said.

“One day, a component will fail randomly and we won’t have a backup for it. This is the most likely way to end Hubble’s mission.”

NASA has to convert a large portion of Hubble’s hardware to backup

Hubble’s payload computer – a 1980s machine that controls and monitors all of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments – suddenly stopped working on June 13. The engineers tried to restart it several times and failed.

Eventually, after doing more diagnostic tests, they realized that the computer wasn’t the problem at all – some other hardware on the spacecraft was causing the shutdown.

It took another three weeks to identify a possible culprit. Now, Hubble engineers believe a fault safety in the telescope’s power control unit (PCU) has ordered the payload computer to shut down. The PCU may be sending the wrong voltage to the computer, or the fault lock itself may be malfunctioning.

The good news is that every piece of Hubble has a twin pre-installed on the telescope in case they fail. So NASA engineers have to switch to the standby PCU.

But it is not as simple as turning off one PCU and turning on another one. The unit is connected to many other components of the Telescope’s Scientific Measurement and Data Processing Instrument Control Unit (SI C&DH for short). So NASA has to switch on the whole side of SI C&DH.

After NASA makes the conversion on Thursday, this new side of SI C&DH will have no backup. If it fails within a few years, it could mean the end of Hubble.

But for now, bringing the observatory back online is critical to NASA.

“Hubble is one of NASA’s most important astrophysics missions. It’s been in operation for more than 31 years, and NASA hopes to continue for many more years,” an agency spokesperson told Insider in June.

NASA has used backup Hubble hardware before, but it’s risky

NASA said that although the telescope and its science instruments are still in working condition, the switch will be “more dangerous” than engineers expected after they first evaluated the problem.

“You can’t see the spacecraft, you can’t watch it happen,” Hertz said. “You have to make sure that your loadouts are going to do exactly what you intend to do.”

He added, “You don’t want to accidentally turn off the radio receiver. You don’t want to accidentally swap a battery that isn’t ready to be swapped out.” “You just don’t want to accidentally break anything.”

So NASA engineers checked and revised their plans again before the agency agreed to the switch. The team ran simulations of the switch on computers simulating Hubble on Earth, and NASA performed two reviews of the procedures for switching devices.

“I told the team, ‘I’m not in a hurry,'” Hertz said. “The most important thing is to get Hubble back safely – not to get Hubble back as quickly as possible.”

NASA has restarted Hubble using this type of process in the past. In 2008, after a computer crash brought the telescope to a standstill for two weeks, engineers turned to redundant instruments.

A year later, astronauts repaired two broken devices while in orbit — and that was Hubble’s fifth and final re-service. NASA currently has no way to launch astronauts into the space telescope.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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