Hubble, the famous space telescope, ensures that we regularly see magnified celestial bodies and formations in the universe. The orbiter, which orbits the Earth, is capable of detecting cosmic phenomena in both the infrared and ultraviolet regions, and during his career he has been able to observe and discover very distant galaxies, hundreds of millions of light years (!) away. Hubble has had to be repaired many times over the years, but recently it had to shut down completely for over a month due to a malfunction in its power supply unit. However, NASA experts have recovered the telescope and have already taken two more images, which can be viewed below.
The images featured in the article have also been released with permission from University of Washington program in Seattle and program director Juliana Dalcanton, to prove that Hubble is working again. The first image depicts a pair of galaxies called ARP-MADORE2115-273, which can be observed in the southern sky and is rare 297 million light-years away from us. In the other image, we can look at a spiral galaxy called ARP-MADORE0002-503, which is 490 million light-years away, with arms up to 163,000 light-years away, three times larger than our Milky Way.
Hubble was launched from the Kennedy Space Center on April 24, 1990, using a space shuttle called Discovery, and the first image was taken immediately on May 20 of a cluster of galaxies (NGC 3532). In just its first year and a half, 1,900 observations of 900 astronomical targets have been made, giving scientists a deeper look at Pluto, the supernova, Saturn’s massive atmospheric storm, and more than 1.5 million observations in its entire life. The most recent problem occurred on June 13, 2021, when the computer controlling and coordinating the space telescopes shut down.
As a result, the main console put Hubble in a reduced or safe mode, so it actually stopped working. With the observatory operating 547 kilometers above Earth, it was difficult to correct the problem, which engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenland, Maryland, were working on. The work was made more complicated by the fact that the space telescope was built in the 1980s, so professionals had to look back more than 30 years in time to discover a solution. Fortunately, former staff members at the time were still available to assist the engineers with their expertise and documentation.
Experts suspected the memory module and then suspected a hardware malfunction, but in the end research on July 15 concluded that the power controller was the goose. It was then that they were able to move on to the security services, and on July 17, Hubble was restarted. There was a similar transition before, in 2008, and the last repairs to the space telescope were made in 2009, replacing the most important control unit (Science Instrument and Command & Data Handling), significantly increasing Hubble’s service life.
