Hubble Suddenly Quiet

The hubble space telescope stopped transmittind data on September 27th for an unknown reason. They could use the secondary unit onbard the hubble, but if the 18 year old telescope had one wire loose the whole thing could explode, destroying millions of dollars worth of scientific equipment. "The probability of failure is pretty low … but the consequences of a failure could be very high,” Preston Burch, Hubble manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt told Science News in an interview on September 30. “There are concerns about blowing a fuse, having a relay stick or having a box fail.”

This problem came two weeks before the telescope was going to be upgraded. The problem will delay the mission, untill at least next Febuary!! "Our goal is to sort out reality from overly conservative fears, by first practicing switching sides on Hubble’s electrical replica on the ground at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center" Burch says. "If that exercise goes well, engineers would attempt to switch to the duplicate unit on Hubble sometime toward the end of next week"

"The relatively high operating temperature of the formatting unit may have contributed to its failure, but scientists may not know the root cause of the problem until the device is brought back to Earth" Burch says. So it will be one year before the "device is brought back to Earth" and is fixed. The images that hubble has taken are amazing and I really hope that the NASA fixes it as soon as possible. I will post a comment with some pictures that hubble has taken, so that you can see how amazing they are.

www.sciencenews.org