Hubble Is Back! Risky Maneuver Saves The World's Most Powerful Space Telescope
On Friday, the agency announced that Hubble had successfully turned on backups to the faulty hardware that shut down its operations more than a month ago. Now NASA engineers are slowly returning the telescope to full operations. The process could take a few days.
"I was quite worried," NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in a Friday video interview with Nzinga Tull, who led the Hubble team through troubleshooting. "We all knew this was riskier than [what] we normally do."
Hubble is the world's most powerful space telescope, but it's getting old. It launched into orbit in 1990. It has photographed the births and deaths of stars, spotted new moons circling Pluto, and tracked two interstellar objects zipping through our Solar System.
Its observations have allowed astronomers to calculate the age and expansion of the Universe and to peer at galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang.
