By NASA
November 23, 2021
3D animation revealing the Hubble Space Telescope over the Earth. Credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & & L. L. Christensen).
NASA continues bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back to regular science operations, most recently recuperating the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument Sunday, November 21. This video camera will be the second of Hubbles instruments, after the Advanced Camera for Surveys, to resume science after suspending the spacecrafts observations on October 25. The Wide Field Camera 3s very first science observation considering that the anomaly will be on November 23.
Engineers also started preparing changes to the instrument specifications, while evaluating the changes on ground simulators. These modifications would allow the instruments to deal with a number of missed out on synchronization messages while continuing to run usually if they happen in the future.
The team has determined no further message losses because monitoring began November 1, NASA is taking extra steps to keep the hardware safe in case the issue returns. Examination continues into the reason for the missed out on messages. The staying Hubble instruments are still in safe mode and the rest of the spacecraft continues to operate as anticipated.