NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope may be back in action shortly

NASA engineers have figured out how to bring the ailing Hubble Space Telescope back online after troubleshooting an instrument that wasn’t working properly. The observatory, currently in orbit around Earth, has been in safe mode since October 5th when a crucial piece of steering hardware — needed to point the telescope — failed. A backup piece of hardware will be used instead, allowing Hubble to operate at its full capacity again. One of Hubble’s gyroscopes, the devices that are needed to measure how fast the telescope is turning in space, failed on October 5th. Two of Hubble’s six gyros are already offline, and the failure brought the working number of gyros down to three. Hubble only needs three of them to work at any given time in... Continue reading…