The Hubble Space Telescope is back in operation: after a forced shutdown of five weeks, due to a malfunction in the power supply of the on-board computer, NASA technicians managed to reactivate it and then restart the scientific instruments, which had been stopped since last June 13. .
The first data collections began over the weekend, but it will still take several days to complete all the recovery operations, as NASA explains in a statement.
Great satisfaction from the number one of the US space agency, Bill Nelson, who says he is proud of the whole Hubble team: "thanks to their dedication and their painstaking work, Hubble will continue to increase its legacy accumulated in 31 years of activity. , expanding our horizons with his vision of the universe ”.
Launched in 1990 thanks to the collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), Hubble has conducted over 1.5 million observations of over 48,000 celestial objects: thus it has produced more than 169 terabytes of data, with which more than 18,000 scientific works. However, his long and honored career has had several difficult moments. In 2018, an anomaly in one of the three gyroscopes had already forced Hubble to suspend operations. In the last month of March, however, some software problems had arisen that had caused the telescope to go into safe mode. Finally, on 13 June the on-board computer went offline due to a technical problem in the Power Control Unit (PCU) which has the task of guaranteeing a constant supply voltage to the on-board computer.It took more than a month of failed diagnostic tests and recovery attempts to resolve the problem.
