End of Hubble? Something Went Seriously Wrong With Hubble And NASA Is Unable To Fix It!

End of Hubble? Something Went Seriously Wrong With Hubble And NASA Is Unable To Fix It!

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been down since 13 June 2021. The iconic $2.5 billion space telescope is one of the biggest telescopes ever built by humankind. In its three decades of service, Hubble has immensely contributed to physics and astronomy.

However, on June 13,2021, Hubble’s payload computer suddenly stopped working. As per NASA, the main computer stopped receiving a “keep-alive” signal, a standard handshake between the payload and main spacecraft computers, to indicate that all is well.

#NASA has spent more than a week trying to fix the telescope’s glitch by running a series of tests on the malfunctioning computer system, but all the efforts made till now have failed.

The instruments onboard meant to snap pictures and collect data are currently not working. And this has put #Hubble in an offline mode right now! Hubble has four memory modules. And amongst these four memory modules, only one is used operationally while the other three serve as backups.

Initially, it was thought that one of the memory modules was degrading, which caused the error. However, when the team performed several tests on the computer’s memory modules, the results had something different to say.

The operations team attempted to switch to a backup memory module. However, the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete twice in a row. This has aroused suspicions that probably a different piece of the computer hardware has caused the problem.

Hubble has a backup computer unit that was installed in 2009. If nothing works, Hubble will switch to this unit and be back online.