NASA preps 'more complex and riskier' Hubble Space Telescope fix
The Hubble Space Telescope has spent over three decades delivering glorious images and data, but it's showing its age. The Hubble team is still troubleshooting a problem with the telescope's payload computer -- a piece of hardware built in the 1980s -- that controls its science instruments. So far, the fixes haven't worked, but the agency isn't giving up.
The computer issue cropped up on June 13. "After analyzing the data, the Hubble operations team is investigating whether a degrading memory module led to the computer halt," NASA said in a statement a few days later. Hubble is a joint project from NASA and the European Space Agency.
Hubble's time stuck in safe mode is lengthening. In a June 18 update, NASA said the telescope and science instruments are healthy. NASA announced on June 22 the memory issue might actually be a symptom of a problem with a different piece of computer hardware. NASA ran additional tests that included turning on Hubble's backup payload computer for the first time since it was installed during a space shuttle servicing mission in 2009.
"The tests showed that numerous combinations of these hardware pieces from both the primary and backup payload computer all experienced the same error -- commands to write into or read from memory were not successful," NASA said on June 25.
