Space is a good environment to preserve electronics that have been asleep for 18 years, NASA officials said Tuesday.
The Hubble Space Telescope could be back to full operations as early as Friday after being switched to a backup processor that has not been used or tested in the satellite’s 18-year mission.
NASA engineers will begin sending commands to switch to the reserve science data formatter today, and expect to see the first images around midnight Thursday, said Art Whipple, Hubble Space Telescope systems manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. The formatter failed Sept. 27, postponing a shuttle mission to service the Hubble scheduled to launch Tuesday.
“There is no indication this failure affected any other components … anywhere else on the spacecraft,” Whipple said.
The maintenance mission, now scheduled for February, will include a replacement formatter, as well as new gyroscopes, batteries and more powerful instruments to track and map the cosmos.
Hubble revealed the age of the universe to be about 13 billion to 14 billion years, and played a key role in the discovery of dark energy, a mysterious force driving the expansion of the universe. More than 6,000 scientific papers have been published using Hubble data, according to the official Hubble Web page.
Even if the switch fails, the satellite is not totally blind, Whipple said. The fine guidance sensors, which keep Hubble pointed steadily in the right direction, “are themselves capable of some very important science.”
Astronomers at Johns Hopkins’ Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble, are optimistic NASA will save the satellite and excited about the observatory’s future.
“The new instruments they’re going to install are vastly more powerful than the first-generation instruments that went up with it,” said Ray Villard, spokesman for the institute. “If the servicing mission is successfully completed, the best years of its mission are still ahead of it.”
[email protected]
