{"id":18314,"date":"2018-10-15T22:42:22","date_gmt":"2018-10-15T14:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/chandra-x-ray-telescope-is-back-at-work-engineers-trace-glitch-to-3-seconds-of-error\/"},"modified":"2018-10-15T22:42:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T14:42:22","slug":"chandra-x-ray-telescope-is-back-at-work-engineers-trace-glitch-to-3-seconds-of-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/chandra-x-ray-telescope-is-back-at-work-engineers-trace-glitch-to-3-seconds-of-error\/","title":{"rendered":"Chandra X-ray telescope is back at work: Engineers trace glitch to 3 seconds of error"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Chandra\"
An artist\u2019s conception shows the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. (NASA \/ CXC \/ SAO Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s 19-year-old Chandra X-ray Observatory has been returned to its normal pointing mode after a data glitch forced a five-day outage, NASA said today.<\/p>\n

The bus-sized spacecraft went into safe mode on Oct. 10, bringing science observations to a halt. The Chandra mission\u2019s operation team determined that the outage was caused by a fault in one of the gyroscopes used by Chandra\u2019s pointing system. That fault resulted in a three-second period of bad data, which led the onboard computer to calculate an incorrect value for the spacecraft\u2019s momentum, NASA said in today\u2019s status update.<\/p>\n

The erroneous reading triggered the safe-mode condition, which caused Chandra to swap critical hardware operations to backup units and reconfigure its mirrors and solar panels to avoid the risk of damage.<\/p>\n

Chandra\u2019s operation team diagnosed the problem and switched gyroscopes to get the pointing system up and running again. The gyroscope that experienced the glitch has been placed in reserve.<\/p>\n