Hubble Remains in Safe Mode After Latest Glitch
upstart writes:
Hubble remains in safe mode after latest glitch - SpaceNews:
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, offline for more than a week because of an issue with its instruments, is likely to remain out of service for another week as engineers investigate the problem.
Hubble's science instruments went into a safe mode early Oct. 25 after they issued error codes indicating the loss of "synchronization messages," which provide timing information used by the instruments. The safe mode stopped scientific operations of the telescope, although the instruments themselves, and the rest of the spacecraft, are in good health.
This was not the first time a problem with synchronization messages affected Hubble. Two days earlier, instruments also issued error codes because of a loss of a specific synchronization message, NASA said in a Nov. 1 statement. Controllers reset the instruments and science operations resumed the next day.
[...] Despite these problems, astronomers remain hopeful that Hubble can remain operations through much of the decade. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in early June, officials with the Space Telescope Science Institute said they were working on initiatives to extend the life of the telescope and its instruments to as late as 2030.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.