{"id":13410,"date":"2019-01-10T19:41:57","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T11:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/controllers-troubleshoot-problem-with-hubble-camera\/"},"modified":"2019-01-10T19:41:57","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T11:41:57","slug":"controllers-troubleshoot-problem-with-hubble-camera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/controllers-troubleshoot-problem-with-hubble-camera\/","title":{"rendered":"Controllers troubleshoot problem with Hubble camera"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: Updated Jan. 11 with correction regarding the field-of-view of the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis took this photo of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The partial shutdown of the U.S. government could complicate efforts to troubleshoot a suspected hardware problem with the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s premier science instrument, but officials are optimistic the camera will eventually be restored to operations, the head of the observatory\u2019s science operations team said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Hubble\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3, responsible for nearly half of the observatory\u2019s scientific output, suspended operations Tuesday when on-board software detected a fault \u201csomewhere in the electronics\u201d of one of its two observing channels, said Tom Brown, head of the Hubble Space Telescope mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees the mission\u2019s scientific operations for NASA.<\/p>\n

Brown said the problem on Wide Field Camera 3, known as WFC3, is on the instrument\u2019s ultraviolet and visible light channel. The camera also has a heat-sensitive infrared observing channel.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looks like it\u2019s probably some kind of hardware failure on the UVIS (ultraviolet and visible light) side of the instrument, but the instrument has redundancies, and we haven\u2019t tapped into any of those yet in the nearly 10 years it\u2019s been up there,\u201d Brown said Wednesday in a phone interview with Spaceflight Now. \u201cSo right now it\u2019s just a matter of making sure we can isolate where the fault is, and then seeing the right path forward, whether it\u2019s bypassing the fault on the current side of the electronics, or bringing up redundant electronics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis\u2019s STS-125 servicing mission in May 2009 installed Wide Field Camera 3 into Hubble\u2019s science bay. Jointly developed by NASA engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Ball Aerospace, the instrument is designed for wide field imaging of stars, galaxies and planets in our own solar system.<\/p>\n

The camera was also the instrument that first detected Ultima Thule \u2014 formally named 2014 MU69 \u2014 the distant object in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto visited by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft during a speedy encounter New Year\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

Brown is optimistic engineers can bring the camera back online.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe instrument is going to be brought back up,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of what\u2019s the right way to bring it back up \u2026 Most of the critical stuff, the electronics and so forth, are redundant, and power supplies and those kinds of things. It\u2019s a matter of going through and isolating where the fault is before you spin up any of those redundancies because you don\u2019t want to do any harm. You want to be sure you understand what the situation is before you bring up any of the spare electronics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, tweeted Wednesday that \u201cissues are bound to happen from time to time\u201d on space missions.<\/p>\n