Skip to main content

Hubble Space Telescope restored and active following synchronization issue

After an error that occurred in late October forced it into safe mode, the Hubble Space Telescope is now back up and running at full strength.

Hubble suffered an issue with the communications between its computers and instruments on October 25, when several synchronization messages were lost. To prevent any damage to its instruments, the telescope automatically went into safe mode in which only the basic essential parts of the telescope functioned. That meant that it stopped collecting science data while engineers on the ground figured out what had gone wrong.

Throughout November, the Hubble team analyzed the issue and tested out the problems by turning on an older, unused instrument. This allowed them to perform a test without endangering the currently active instruments which Hubble still needs to use.

As that test didn’t throw up any more errors, the team elected to turn on each of Hubble’s four currently active instruments one at a time. With no more missed synchronization messages, they turned on the final instrument — the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph — this week.

“NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope team recovered the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on Monday, December 6, and is now operating with all four active instruments collecting science. The team has still not detected any further synchronization message issues since monitoring began November 1,” NASA wrote in an update.

NASA also explained that its Hubble team has a plan to prevent similar issues from happening again in the future, by allowing the instruments to continue operating even if a few synchronization messages are lost. To make this change, they will gradually make tweaks to Hubble’s software over the next few months, beginning in the next weeks.

“The team will continue work on developing and testing changes to instrument software that would allow them to conduct science operations even if they encounter several lost synchronization messages in the future,” the update said. “The first of these changes is scheduled to be installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in mid-December. The other instruments will receive similar updates in the coming months.”

This was the second time this year that Hubble has been in trouble, with an issue with its computer causing it to enter safe mode this summer as well.

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Space station crew investigating yet another coolant leak
The Soyuz MS-18 crew ship is pictured docked to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.

A Soyuz spaceship docked to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module in 2021. NASA / NASA

The International Space Station (ISS) is reportedly dealing with yet another coolant leak.

Read more
Hubble observes mysterious bright explosion in the middle of nowhere
An artist’s concept of one of the brightest explosions ever seen in space.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently observed something strange: an extremely bright, extremely fast flash of light that popped up in the middle of nowhere. Technically known as a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT), the odd thing about this rare event was that it occurred outside of a galaxy.

These flashes have been observed only a few times since they were discovered in 2018, and this particular event was named The Finch. Hubble was used to track the flash's origin point, which was in between two galaxies: 50,000 light-years away from a larger spiral galaxy and around 15,000 light-years away from a smaller galaxy. This has astronomers puzzled, as these events were thought to issue from inside galaxies where stars are forming -- but this event happened far away from any star-forming region.

Read more
U.S. issues its first-ever fine for space debris
An illustration showing Earth-orbiting space junk.

Space junk orbiting Earth is a growing problem. Old rocket parts and decommissioned satellites are orbiting our planet at great speed, posing a threat not only to functioning satellites providing critical services but also to humans aboard the International Space Station and China’s own orbital facility.

The situation is made worse when the space garbage crashes into each other, causing them to break into smaller, equally hazardous pieces.

Read more