We’ll get an update on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope tomorrow (June 4), and it could be a pretty big deal.
On June 3, the agency announced that the Hubble Space Telescope team will hold a press conference about the observatory’s status tomorrow at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT). Specifically, officials said the purpose of this meeting will be to “provide an update on operations” for the telescope. Sounds routine, right? Well, not necessarily. The Hubble telescope team doesn’t often hold press conferences like this — especially one with just two presenters, both of whom have pretty high-profile titles.
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.
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The news comes three days after Hubble went into automatic safe mode due to erroneous readings coming from one of its last three working gyroscopes, which are devices that help scientists make sure the telescope is pointing in the right direction. Since it was launched in 1990, Hubble has gone through a number of gyroscopes, including several replacements. Now, there are three left.
Before you worry too much: Yes, this may seem like a terrible combination of facts in isolation. However, there is a context within which we can place them—context that offers hope that Hubble is not yet done with its tasks.
First of all, in its announcement of the upcoming conference, NASA said something that agency officials have repeated time and time again: “NASA anticipates that Hubble will continue to make discoveries, working with other observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope of the agency, throughout this decade and into the next.”
That’s a sentiment that’s been shared during previous gyroscope problems Hubble has also faced, including earlier this year and late last year; The latest incident actually involved a short string of complications that were all corrected. However, neither required a press conference to inform the public about Hubble’s return to it. Online announcements were enough.
This brings us to the next point: Hubble doesn’t really need all three gyroscopes to work.
As NASA has stated, Hubble technically only requires one gyroscope to function properly — although, according to the European Space Agency (which is partnering with NASA on the mission), single-gyro mode may limit science observations to some extent .
Still, even if it turns out that the telescope’s already faulty gyroscope isn’t getting back on track, there are two that could allow the space explorer to continue probing the universe. In 2004, for example, the observatory was put into dual-gyro mode after a planned Hubble servicing mission was canceled following the space shuttle Columbia tragedy. Eventually, Hubble Servicing Mission 4 replaced all six gyroscopes for the last time in 2009 and ended up being the fifth servicing mission after that. But then again, Hubble now has only three of those gyroscopes left, one of which is the source of the last number. The other three all experienced what is known as the “bent lead failure,” which is about wiring.
According to a NASA breakdown, in the event that only two gyroscopes are left working, it is likely that the team will keep one and place the other in reserve. That way, if one of those two remaining gyroscopes goes down, the rested one will be nice and fresh and ready for Hubble’s final stretch.
The final stretch? Hopefully not, but unfortunately it’s true that scientists believe the telescope could be decommissioned in the mid-to-late 2030s because our planet’s atmospheric pull is slowly pulling the spacecraft down from its orbit of about 320 miles (515 kilometers) above the Earth.
Such a dismantling would involve either a controlled re-entry of the telescope back into Earth’s atmosphere or a small field boost to higher Earth orbit, where it could rest safely for several decades. If Hubble re-enters the atmosphere, it would mostly burn up like other spacecraft in that process – but it’s too big to FULLY they burn. I imagine that anything that can be saved will be preserved with the honor it deserves.
If you’re locked into that brief mention of serving the spacecraft in orbit, as astronauts famously did during its early years, it’s unclear if that’s even a possibility anymore.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, intrepid NASA astronauts managed to get into Earth orbit and interact with the observatory to install improvements and apply renovations. The aforementioned service missions 4 and 5 were part of this effort. Think microgravity body shop for a space telescope that also involves spacewalking.
Hubble’s best-known servicing mission is probably the first, which occurred shortly after the telescope was launched into space because its essential science data appeared to be corrupted when it returned to Earth. Hubble’s images were blurry, to put it simply, and scientists realized they had accidentally given the spacecraft a flawed mirror. No problem, the agency said, and sent astronauts to make the necessary adjustments. In space!
Recently, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who has been prominent in the commercial space sector thanks to the successful all-civilian space launch Inspiration4 that he funded and his upcoming Polaris Dawn endeavor, tried to reboot the Hubble service concept. However, this concept has not yet come to fruition and it is uncertain if it ever will.
That said – and I’m aware of the hypocrisy behind what I’m about to say – speculation is the enemy of optimism.
Theoretically, anything is possible, we’ll know more about Hubble’s fate soon, and it’s probably best to delay our worries until we have something to worry about. Also, in general, Hubble has continued to deliver space images as if nothing had changed. A new star portrait came out today, in fact, and Hubble had a hand in building it. It’s a very cool view of a baby star that has a comet-like tail because other stars (hidden in the image) are pulling in its material.