The Hubble Space Telescope has been displaying its age for some time, however a brand new downside is proving to be particularly irritating. As the AP reports, NASA has spent practically every week (as of this writing) making an attempt to repair a glitch in Hubble’s payload pc. The system broke down on June thirteenth, and the operations staff had no success both restarting the pc on the 14th or switching to a backup reminiscence module. The agancey additionally failed in repeated makes an attempt with each modules on the night of June seventeenth.
The telescope and its scientific devices are nonetheless in “good health,” the company mentioned, though the operators put the devices in a secure mode as a precaution.
This is not the primary such glitch this yr. NASA spent days reviving Hubble in March following a software program error in the principle flight pc. It additionally found that the Wide Field Camera 3’s voltage ranges had dropped over the many years, to the purpose the place staff meambers wanted to scale back these ranges to stop future issues.
As with that digital camera, age could play a task on this newest glitch. Hubble’s payload system makes use of a Eighties-era NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) that features two computer systems and 4 64K CMOS reminiscence modules. Only one pc and reminiscence module are in use at any given time, however which may not matter a lot if multiple element is failing. In that mild, the James Webb Space Telescope cannot come quickly sufficient — whereas it was already billed as a successor to Hubble, it could be the one choice if the older machine retains failing with this type of frequency.
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