Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Mon., July 19, 2021,
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope photographed colliding galaxies after recovering from a month-long mystery glitch
The Hubble Space Telescope hovers at the boundary of Earth and space in this picture, taken after Hubble's second servicing mission in 1997. NASA
NASA shared the Hubble Space Telescope's first photos since it was fixed this weekend.
Hubble is back online after a month of mysterious glitching that forced NASA to use backup hardware.
The photos show colliding galaxies and a long galactic spiral.
The Hubble Space Telescope is back, and NASA has the pictures to prove it.
The Earth-orbiting observatory went offline on June 13 and stayed that way for more than a month while engineers struggled to identify a mysterious glitch. NASA still hasn't announced what exactly caused the problem, but the agency's engineers managed to bring Hubble back online by activating some of its backup hardware on Thursday.
"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 we normally do."
Hubble slowly powered up its science instruments again over the weekend and conducted system check-outs to make sure everything still worked. Then it snapped its first images since the whole debacle started.
The telescope focused its lens on a set of unusual galaxies on Saturday. One of its new images shows a pair of galaxies slowly colliding. The other image shows a spiral galaxy with long, extended arms. Most spiral galaxies have an even number of arms, but this one only has three.
Hubble's first images after recovering from a month-long glitch show some unusual galaxies. Science: NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (UW) Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Hubble is also observing Jupiter's northern and southern lights, or auroras, as well as tight clusters of stars. NASA hasn't shared images from those observations yet.
"I'm thrilled to see that Hubble has its eye back on the universe, once again capturing the kind of images that have intrigued and inspired us for decades," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release. "This is a moment to celebrate the success of a team truly dedicated to the mission. Through their efforts, Hubble will continue its 32nd year of discovery, and we will continue to learn from the observatory's transformational vision."
A mysterious glitch that took a month to fix
The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit above Earth. NASA
Hubble, the world's most powerful space telescope, 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.
But the telescope's payload computer suddenly stopped working on June 13. That computer, built in the 1980s, is like Hubble's brain - it controls and monitors all the science instruments on the spacecraft. Engineers tried and failed to bring it back online several times. Eventually, after running more diagnostic tests, they realized that the computer wasn't the problem at all - some other hardware on the spacecraft was causing the shutdown
Nzinga Tull, Hubble systems anomaly response manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, works in the control room July 15 to restore Hubble to full science operations. NASA GSFC/Rebecca Roth
It's still not totally clear which piece of hardware was the culprit. Engineers suspect that a failsafe on the telescope's Power Control Unit (PCU) instructed the payload computer to shut down. The PCU could have been sending the wrong voltage of electricity to the computer, or the failsafe itself could have been malfunctioning.
NASA was prepared for issues like this. Each piece of Hubble's hardware has a twin pre-installed on the telescope in case it fails. So engineers switched all the faulty parts to that backup hardware. Now the telescope is back in full observation mode.
"I feel super excited and relieved," Tull said after making the hardware switch. "Glad to have good news to share."
Though NASA has fixed the glitch, it's a sign that Hubble's age may be starting to interfere with its science. The telescope hasn't been upgraded since 2009, and some of its hardware is more than 30 years old.
"This is an older machine, and it's kind of telling us: Look, I'm getting a little bit old here, right? It's talking to us," Zurbuchen said on Friday. "Despite that, more science is ahead, and we're excited about it."
Cosmic Lens Flare: Hubble Captures Strong Gravitational Lensing
Galaxy cluster MACSJ0138.0-2155 imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Newman, M. Akhshik, K. Whitaker
The center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is framed by the tell-tale arcs that result from strong gravitational lensing, a striking astronomical phenomenon which can warp, magnify, or even duplicate the appearance of distant galaxies.
Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a distant galaxy is subtly distorted by the gravitational pull of an intervening astronomical object. In this case, the relatively nearby galaxy cluster MACSJ0138.0-2155 has lensed a significantly more distant quiescent galaxy — a slumbering giant known as MRG-M0138 which has run out of the gas required to form new stars and is located 10 billion light years away. Astronomers can use gravitational lensing as a natural magnifying glass, allowing them to inspect objects like distant quiescent galaxies which would usually be too difficult for even Hubble to resolve.
This image was made using observations from eight different infrared filters spread across two of Hubble’s most advanced astronomical instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. These instruments were installed by astronauts during the final two servicing missions to Hubble, and provide astronomers with superbly detailed observations across a large area of sky and a wide range of wavelengths.
No comments:
Post a Comment