Tomorrow (June 4) we’ll get news on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and it could be a big deal.
On June 3, the agency announced that the Hubble Space Telescope team will hold a press conference on the observatory’s status tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT). Specifically, officials said the purpose of this meeting will be to «provide an update on operations» for the telescope. Sounds routine, right? Well, not necessarily. It’s not often that the Hubble Telescope team holds a press conference like this one – especially one with only two presenters, both of whom hold fairly high-profile titles.
Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division and the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, will speak, as will Patrick Crouse, Hubble’s project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Related: A billionaire hopes to upgrade the Hubble telescope in a private SpaceX mission, but can it really happen?
The news comes three days after NASA announced that Hubble had gone into automatic fail-safe mode due to erroneous readings from one of its last three working gyroscopes, devices that help scientists make sure the telescope is pointed in the right direction. Since it was launched in 1990, Hubble has gone through a bunch 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. However, there is a certain context within which to place them – a context that offers hope that Hubble is not yet done with his duties.
First of all, in its announcement about the upcoming conference, NASA said something that agency officials have said time and time again: «NASA anticipates that Hubble will continue to make discoveries, working with other observatories such as the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope, throughout this decade and into the next. »
This is a sentiment that has been shared during previous gyroscope problems that Hubble has also faced, including earlier this year and late last year; the latter incident actually involved a brief series of complications that were all corrected. However, neither required a conference to inform the public that Hubble was back at it. Online announcements were enough.
This brings us to the next point: Hubble doesn’t actually need all three gyroscopes to operate.
As NASA has stated, Hubble technically only needs one gyroscope to function properly — although, according to the European Space Agency (which is NASA’s mission partner), the single-gyro mode may limit scientific observations somewhat.
Still, even if the telescope’s now-defunct gyroscope turns out not to get back on track, there are two that may allow the space explorer to continue exploring the universe. For example, in 2004 the observatory was switched to dual-gyro mode after the intended Hubble servicing mission was canceled following the space shuttle Columbia tragedy. Finally, Hubble Servicing Mission 4 replaced all six gyroscopes for the last time in 2009, after which the fifth servicing mission ended. But, again, Hubble now has only three of those gyroscopes left, one of which is the source of the last number. The other three all experienced what’s known as a «flexible failure,» which has to do with the wiring.
According to NASA’s breakdown, in the event that only two gyroscopes remain operational, it is likely that the team will leave one on and place the other in reserve. That way, if one of those two remaining gyroscopes fails, the other one that was resting will be nice and fresh and ready for Hubble’s final leg.
The last section? Let’s hope not, but unfortunately it’s true that scientists believe the telescope could be decommissioned in the mid-to-late 2030s as the force of our planet’s atmospheric drag slowly lowers the spacecraft from its orbit roughly 320 miles (515 kilometers) above Earth.
Such a decommissioning would involve either a controlled re-entry of the telescope back into Earth’s atmosphere or a small upscaling into high Earth orbit, where it could be safe for several decades. If Hubble re-enters the atmosphere, it would mostly burn up like other spacecraft in the process – but it’s too big completely burn. I imagine that anything that could be saved would be preserved with the honor it deserves.
If you’re stuck with that brief mention of servicing the spacecraft in orbit, as astronauts famously did during its early years, it’s not clear that’s even an option anymore.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, intrepid NASA astronauts were able to take themselves to Earth orbit and tinker with the observatory to install upgrades and make modifications. The aforementioned service missions 4 and 5 were part of this effort. Imagine a microgravity workshop for a space telescope that also includes space walking.
Hubble’s most famous servicing mission is probably the first one, which occurred shortly after the telescope was launched into space because its core science data appeared to be damaged when it returned to Earth. The Hubble images were blurry, to put it simply, and scientists realized that they had accidentally given the spacecraft a faulty mirror. No problem, the agency said, and sent astronauts to make the necessary adjustments. In space!
More recently, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who has been prominent in the commercial space sector thanks to the successful Inspiration4 all-civilian space launch he funded and his upcoming venture Polaris Dawn, has attempted to reboot Hubble’s servicing concept. However, this concept has not yet caught on, and it is uncertain whether it ever will.
That said – and I’m aware of the hypocrisy behind what I’m about to say – speculation is the enemy of optimism.
In theory, anything is possible, we’ll soon know more about Hubble’s fate, and it’s probably best to postpone our worries until there’s no reason to worry. Also, in general, Hubble continued to send space images as if nothing had changed. A new stellar portrait was actually released today, and Hubble participated in its creation. It’s a very cool view of a newborn star that has a comet-like tail because other stars (hidden in the image) are pulling its material.
Editor’s Update 6/3: On May 31, NASA announced that Hubble had entered safe mode.
