Tomorrow (June 4th) we get an update on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, 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 tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) on the status of the observatory. Specifically, officials said the goal of the meeting will be to “provide an update on the operation” of the telescope. Sounds routine, right? Well, not necessarily. It’s not often that the Hubble team holds press conferences like this—especially one with only two moderators, both of whom hold relatively high degrees.
Mark Clampin, director of the 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.
Related: A billionaire hopes to upgrade Hubble on a private SpaceX mission, but could it actually happen?
The news comes three days after Hubble went into automatic safe mode due to erroneous data coming from one of its last three working gyroscopes, devices that help scientists make sure the telescope is pointing in the right direction. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has gone through a number of gyroscopes, including some replacements. Now there are three left.
Before you get too worried: Yes, that may seem like a terrible combination of facts in isolation. But there is a context in which to place them—a context that offers hope that Hubble is not done with its duties.
First, in its statement about the upcoming conference, NASA said something that agency officials have repeated time and time again: “NASA expects Hubble to continue to make discoveries throughout this decade in collaboration with other observatories, such as the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope. until the next one.”
This is a sentiment that has been shared during previous gyro problems that Hubble has also faced, including earlier this year and late last year; the last incident actually involved a short chain of complications, all of which have been corrected. Yet neither required the conference to inform the public that Hubble was returning. An online notification was enough.
This brings us to the next point: Hubble doesn’t actually need all three gyroscopes to work.
As NASA said, Hubble technically requires only one gyroscope to function properly — although according to the European Space Agency (which is partnering with NASA on the mission), the single-gyro mode may limit science observations to some extent.
Still, even if the telescope’s now-faulty gyroscope turns out not to return to its original state, there are two that may allow the space explorer to continue exploring space. For example, in 2004, the observatory was put into dual-gyro mode after a planned Hubble servicing mission was canceled due to the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy. Finally, Hubble’s Servicing Mission 4 replaced all six gyroscopes for the last time in 2009, and was the fifth servicing mission after that. But again, Hubble now only has three of these gyroscopes, one of which is the source of the latest problem. The other three experienced what is known as “flex cable failure”, which is related to the cabling.
In the event of a NASA failure in the event that only two gyroscopes are operational, it is likely that the team will keep one and place the other in reserve. That way, if one of those two remaining gyros fails, the other one that was resting will be nice and fresh and ready for HST.
The last stretch? Hopefully not, but it is unfortunately true that scientists believe the telescope may be decommissioned in the mid-to-late 2030s as our planet’s atmospheric drag slowly drags the craft down from its approximately 320-mile orbit (515 kilometers) above the Earth.
Such a decommissioning would involve either a controlled return of the telescope back into Earth’s atmosphere or a small boost of the telescope to a higher Earth orbit where it could rest safely for several decades. If Hubble were to re-enter the atmosphere, it would mostly burn up like other spacecraft in the process – but it is too big to fully to burn I imagine that anything that could be saved would be preserved with the honor it deserves.
If you’re hung up on this brief mention of servicing the spacecraft in orbit, as astronauts famously did during its early years, it’s unclear if that’s still possible.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, brave NASA astronauts managed to get into Earth orbit and tinker with the observatory to install upgrades and make renovations. The aforementioned servicing missions 4 and 5 were part of this effort. Imagine a microgravity body for a space telescope that also includes a spacewalk.
The most famous Hubble servicing mission is probably the first mission that occurred shortly after the telescope was launched into space, as its key science data appeared to be damaged when it returned to Earth. The Hubble images were, simply put, blurry, and scientists realized they had accidentally given the spacecraft a faulty mirror. No problem, the agency said, sending astronauts to make the necessary adjustments. In space!
More recently, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is prominent in the commercial space sector thanks to the successful all-civilian space launch Inspiration4 he funded and his upcoming Polaris Dawn effort, tried to reboot the HST servicing concept. However, this concept has not yet come to fruition and it is not certain that it ever will.
That said – and I am aware of the hypocrisy behind what I am about to say – speculation is the enemy of optimism.
In theory anything is possible, we will soon learn more about Hubble’s fate and it is probably best to put our fears aside until there is nothing to worry about. In general, Hubble also continued to bang out space pictures as if nothing had changed. In fact, a new star portrait was released today, and Hubble had a hand in its construction. It’s a very cool look at a small star that has a comet-like tail because other stars (hidden in the image) are pulling on its material.