• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Despite Failing Gyroscopes, NASA Has A Plan To Keep Hubble Working

June 6, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Fears of the death of the Hubble Space Telescope have turned out to be greatly exaggerated, with plans announced for it to go on, operating on a single gyroscope. Practical observing time will be reduced, as it will take Hubble longer to move from one target to another, but there are no plans to shut it down. 

Advertisement

On May 31, Hubble was placed in safe mode because of faulty readings from one of its gyroscopes. When this was followed by the announcement of a press conference Tuesday afternoon, American time, fears were high that its closure would be announced. After all, Hubble has been operating for 34 years, the last 15 of these without the capacity to service it.

Advertisement

Instead, the conference described a plan to keep the space telescope operating, quite possibly until the mid-2030s when its decaying orbit will see Hubble burn up in the atmosphere, unless intervention occurs. 

Hubble needs its gyroscopes to shift its orientation from one part of the sky to another, as well as to maintain focus on a target once it’s there. It’s designed to operate with three at a time. The 2009 repair mission left it with six – but three of these failed within a decade, so since 2018 it has had no redundancies for full operations. The latest failure means the end of peak performance for the foreseeable future.

However, while three gyroscopes are ideal, in 2008 Hubble demonstrated the capacity to operate on just one, albeit with longer downtime as it reorients. The process relies on using Hubble’s magnetometers and sun sensors to combine with a single gyroscope to get Hubble pointing in the general vicinity of the target. From there, fixed head star trackers and eventually fine guidance sensors slowly bring it to the precise spot in the sky. Once it has found its target, a single gyroscope keeps Hubble pointing almost as precisely as all three.

Schematic of Hubble's multiple guidance systems.

Schematic of Hubble’s multiple guidance systems.

Image Credit: NASA/STSci

The new plan will rely on one of the remaining working gyros, with the other gyro placed in spare mode, to take over when this one fails,

Advertisement

Even the malfunctioning gyro may not be completely dead. It‘s suffering what is known as “saturation”, where it reports the telescope is slewing at the maximum rate when it moves between targets, irrespective of the actual speed of movement. Hubble’s operators have found they can fix the problem temporarily, but saturation always returns. However, with more time, a permanent fix may be found.

The gyroscopes are Hubble’s weak link because they rely on wires thinner than a human hair to carry power in and data out. Passage through the fluid inside the gyroscope can lead to corrosion. 

The limitations may encourage NASA to spend more time on a few targets where extended observations are particularly valuable, such as the famous Hubble deep field, rather than shifting as often. They will also prevent viewing objects closer to us than Mars, given the rate of movement required to track them. However, NASA noted in a statement; “These are rare targets for Hubble.”

When operating, a wheel within the gyroscopes spins at 320 revolutions per second. The considerable angular momentum this provides makes it easy to measure the force produced by any turning of the telescope, allowing that change to be tracked precisely.

Advertisement

After the closure of the space shuttle program, NASA lacks the capacity to perform maintenance on Hubble, let alone boost it into an orbit safe from atmospheric drag. Billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman has offered to cover the costs to revamp Dragon to extend Hubble’s life beyond that date, but questions of safety have kept NASA undecided on the idea. 

Even without such a mission, however, if Hubble can squeeze four years’ worth of operation out of each remaining gyroscope, it could be operating after the JWST, branded as its successor, runs out of fuel.

Hubble has had plenty of near-death experiences before. However, like the hero in an action movie who saves the day operating on one leg (read: gyroscope), one of the greatest scientific instruments in humanity’s history just doesn’t quit.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China has ‘too many’ auto companies now, consolidation needed -minister
  2. Oraan raises $3M to increase financial inclusion among Pakistani women
  3. Buy British: UK pig farmers urge retailers to shun cheaper EU pork
  4. Twitter Says It Is No Longer Stopping Any COVID-19 Misinformation

Source Link: Despite Failing Gyroscopes, NASA Has A Plan To Keep Hubble Working

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version