It's officially in standby. IIRC, Kepler has had a similar problem with its gyros but has still been able to do a bunch of work inspite of that. (If it wasn't Kepler, it was another telescope where the gyros all shat themselves.)
Yup, it was Kepler, and it seems the issue now is that it's out of fuel, not that 3 of its 4 gyros have been dead for years.
Hopefully it's not the end, but if it is...it's given us some great stuff. This one's my favorite. They point the HST at a small, apparently empty section of the sky and get this... Each one of those dots is a GALAXY, each one with millions or billions of stars. Shows us very clearly that the universe is almost incomprehensibly large.
And what always blows my mind is that this no longer exists. It is so far away from us that we know it has transformed into something else by now.
Theory is that they may have been destroyed by the shock wave of a super nova, around 7,000 years ago. It's possible that they still exist, as the super nova may not have been as powerful due to lower levels or x-rays observed, are being slowly being dispersed from a less powerful shockwave.
A close up of one of the pillars, our entire solar system would fit in the nodule highlighted. That's how big the Pillars of Creation are.
It looks like they've fixed the problem. https://arstechnica.com/science/201...-resume-normal-science-operations-soon/?amp=1
That's also how they fixed the latest problem. https://www.cnet.com/news/nasas-hubble-space-telescope-is-back-in-action-after-hardware-problem/
It's been on borrowed time for quite a while. It should have long since been upstaged by the Webb project, but.... Hopefully NASA won't feel any extra pressure to get Webb going. There's too much riding on it.
I'm not sure, but I don't think SpaceX has any spacecraft capable of performing extravehicular activities, which would be needed to perform repairs on the Hubble telescope.
I found this interesting passage on the Wikipedia entry on Hubble: As of 2017, the Trump Administration was considering a proposal by the Sierra Nevada Corporation to use a crewed version of its Dream Chaser spacecraft to service Hubble some time in the 2020s both as a continuation of its scientific capabilities and as insurance against any malfunctions in the to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope.[223] In 2020, John Grunsfeld said that SpaceX Crew Dragon or Orion could perform another repair mission within ten years. While robotic technology is not yet sophisticated enough, he said, with another manned visit "We could keep Hubble going for another few decades" with new gyros and instruments.[224] As much as I would like to see it happen (even though Hubble would be outclassed by Webb it would still be an enormous important resource), I wonder if there comes a time where you just need to shut it down and say "thanks for the memories."
Looks to be a problem with the power supply unit, they're going to fire up the backup PSU and see if that works.
From what I gather it was supposed to have a lifespan of about 30 years, which it passed last year. If it lasts a few more years and overlaps the Webb, that's going to be quite a one-two punch.
