NASA announced recently that it has resumed Hubble Space Telescope operations after a fifteen day outage following gyroscope issues aboard the venerable orbiting telescope. Observations on some instruments resumed December 8, and have continued for the past week, with others slated to come on line at some point in the near future.

Hubble Only Partially Restored

Hubble’s two main cameras, Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys, resumed science observations last week. The Hubble team is planning to restore operations to the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph later this month.

Hubble first went into safe mode on November 19th, and after analysis, it was able to resume observations on November 20th. The unstable gyroscope again caused the observatory to suspend science operations the next day, November 21st. Following another successful recovery, Hubble again entered safe mode again on November 23rd.

Hubble was launched in 1990, and was expected to last fifteen years.

Repair Mission?

In 2009, all six of Hubble’s gyroscopes were replaced in the last of its servicing missions that were carried out by the astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-125. While there, the crew also astronauts installed new batteries, new gyroscopes, a new science computer, a refurbished fine guidance sensor, and new insulation on three electronics bays. 

There has been discussions between SpaceX and NASA regarding a potential sixth repair mission, with the two organizations signing an unfunded Space Act Agreement to study the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program boosting Hubble into a higher orbit with the Dragon spacecraft, at no cost to the government. According to NASA, “there are no plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission or compete this opportunity; the study is designed to help the agency understand the commercial possibilities.”

Jared Isaacmen, the leader of the private Polaris program has stated in the past that a servicing flight to the Hubble Space Telescope aboard a Dragon capsule could be a “logical second mission” for the program. The first Polaris Dawn mission, featuring the first spacewalk carried out by private astronauts, is slated to fly in April 2024. No proposed date has been announced for the Polaris Dawn 2 mission or whether that mission will visit and attempt to repair Hubble.