by We’ll get an update on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope tomorrow (June 4), and it could be quite a deal.
On June 3, the agency announced that the Hubble Space Telescope team will hold a press conference about the status of the observatory tomorrow at 4:00 pm EDT (2000 GMT). Specifically, officials said the point of this meeting will be to “provide an operations update” for the telescope. Sounds routine, right? Well, not necessarily. It’s not often that the Hubble Telescope team holds a press conference like this – especially one with only two presenters, both of whom are quite high-profile.
Mark Clampin, director of the agency’s Astrophysics Division and Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, will speak, as will Patrick Crouse, Hubble project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Related: A billionaire hopes to upgrade the Hubble telescope on a private SpaceX mission, but could it really happen?
The news comes three days after NASA announced that Hubble went into automatic safe mode due to faulty readings coming from one of the last three working gyroscopes, which are devices that help scientists make sure the telescope is pointing. in the right direction. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has had a large number of gyroscopes, including several replacements. Now, he is left with three.
Before you get too worried: Yes, that may be a terrible mix of facts. However, there is some context in which to put them – a context that gives hope that Hubble is not done with his duties yet.
First, in its release about the upcoming conference, NASA said something that agency officials have said repeatedly: “NASA expects Hubble to continue making discoveries, working with other observatories such as the Space Telescope James Webb of the agency, for this decade and into the next.”
This is a sentiment shared during the gyroscope issues that Hubble has also faced, including earlier this year and late last year; the last episode involved a short string of complications that were all cured. However, neither wanted a conference to inform the public about Hubble’s return. Online ads are enough.
That brings us to the next point: Hubble doesn’t actually need all three gyroscopes to work.
As NASA has said, Hubble technically requires only one gyroscope to function properly – although, according to the European Space Agency (NASA’s partners on the mission), single-gyroscope mode may limit observations to some extent science.
Still, even if the now-faulty telescope’s gyroscope turns out not to be getting back on track, there are two that allow the cosmic probe to continue exploring the universe. In 2004, for example, the observatory was put into dual-gyro mode after an expected Hubble servicing mission was canceled due to the Columbia space shuttle tragedy. Eventually, the six gyroscopes were replaced for the last time by Hubble Servicing Mission 4 in 2009, which was eventually followed by a fifth servicing mission. But, again, only three of those gyroscopes remain at Hubble now, one of which is the source of the latest release. The other three experienced something called “flex lead failure”, which is related to wiring.
According to NASA’s breakdown, in the event that only two gyroscopes are left working in total, the team will likely keep one and put the other in reserve. That way, if one of the two remaining gyroscopes falls, the other one that was resting will be nice and fresh and ready for the last piece of Hubble.
The last stretch? Hopefully not, but unfortunately it is true that scientists believe that the telescope could be decommissioned in the mid to late 2030s because our planet’s atmospheric gravity is slowly bringing the craft down from its orbit around 320 miles (515 kilometers) above the Earth.
Such a decommissioning would involve a controlled re-entry of the telescope back into Earth’s atmosphere or a small boost to the scope in higher Earth orbit, where it could rest safely for a few twenty years. If Hubble were to reenter the atmosphere, it would burn up mostly like other spacecraft do during that process – but, it’s too much fully burn up. I imagine that anything that could be saved would be preserved with the honor it deserves.
If you’re hanging on to that brief mention of servicing the spacecraft in orbit, as famous astronauts did in their early years, it’s unclear whether that’s possible now.
Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, brave NASA astronauts ventured up into Earth orbit and tinkered with the observatory to install upgrades and implement renovations. The servicing missions 4 and 5 mentioned above were part of this effort. Consider a microgravity body shop for a space telescope that also involves spacewalks.
The first is probably the most famous Hubble servicing mission, which happened shortly after the telescope was launched into space because its basic science data appeared to be corrupted when it returned to Earth. Hubble’s images were blurry, to put it simply, and scientists realized that they had accidentally given the spacecraft a faulty mirror. Without any difficulty, the agency said, and sent astronauts to make the necessary adjustments. In space!
Related Stories:
— 30 years ago, astronauts saved the Hubble Space Telescope
— A dusty galaxy looks like a cosmic net in a gorgeous new Hubble Telescope photo
— The bejeweled galaxy of ‘Bernice’s Hair’ shines in a new Hubble Telescope photo
Recently, billionaire Jared Isaacman, prominent in the commercial space sector thanks to the all-civilian space launch Inspiration4 he funded and his upcoming Polaris Dawn effort, tried to revive the Hubble service concept. However, this concept has not yet caught on, and it is uncertain whether it will.
That said — and I know the hypocrisy behind what I’m about to say — speculation is the enemy of hope.
In theory, anything is possible, we will know more about Hubble’s fate soon, and it is probably better to delay our worries until there is something to worry about. Also, in general, Hubble has continued to disrupt space images as if nothing had changed. A portrait of a new star came out today, in fact, and Hubble had a hand in building it. It’s a really cool view of a baby star with a comet-like tail because other stars (hidden in the image) are pulling on its material.
Editor’s Update 6/3: On May 31, NASA announced that Hubble had entered safe mode.
