It's been a bad couple weeks in space.

A week ago, technical difficulties forced engineers to put the Hubble Space Telescope's science mission on hold. Now, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is in safe mode, too.

In a statement released on Friday, NASA confirmed Chandra, one of the most powerful telescopes in space, transitioned to safe mode earlier this week.

During safe mode, the observatory's mirrors are pointed away from the sun and its solar panels are turned directly toward the sun. The satellite's most critical hardware is transferred to backup drives.

"Analysis of available data indicates the transition to safe mode was normal behavior for such an event," according to NASA. "All systems functioned as expected and the scientific instruments are safe."

Engineers are still working to determine why Chandra went into safe mode.

As Chandra's Twitter account reminded readers, the powerful X-ray telescope is getting up its in age: "Chandra is 19 years old, which is well beyond the original design lifetime of 5 years."

In a separate release, NASA confirmed Hubble is still in safe mode. Last week, NASA and European Space Agency engineers suspended the telescopes' scientific activities after one of its gyroscopes failed.

Scientists turned on a replacement gyro, but the backup didn't perform as hoped.

"This past week, tests were conducted to assess the condition of that backup gyro. The tests showed that the gyro is properly tracking Hubble's movement, but the rates reported are consistently higher than the true rates," according to NASA.

Because the gyro is reading rates of changes at a greater magnitude, it can't be used to monitor smaller changes. Normally, when fixed on an observation target, Hubble's gyros operate on low-mode.

"The extremely high rates currently being reported exceed the upper limit of the gyro in this low mode, preventing the gyro from reporting the spacecraft's small movements," NASA reported.

If followup troubleshooting efforts fail, Hubble will be forced to shut down all but a single gyroscope. Previous tests showed Hubble can conduct observation using a single gyro.

Hubble and Chandra aren't the only spacecraft in trouble. Earlier this week, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to abort their mission to the space station just moments after launch, ejecting their Soyuz capsule from the rocket and executing an emergency "ballistic descent."

And as NASA reported this week, the Mars rover Opportunity is still silent. Engineers haven't communicated with the rover for four months.

Related Links
Stellar Chemistry, The Universe And All Within It

Tweet

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The Space Media Network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceMediaNetwork Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceMediaNetwork Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only

Astronomy rewind fast forwards to reanimate "zombie" astrophotos
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 17, 2018
More than 30,000 celestial images that were all but lost to science are about to find their way back into researchers' hands thanks to the efforts of thousands of citizen scientists. The photographs, radio maps, and other telescopic images were scanned from the pages of dusty old journals for a cosmic reclamation project called Astronomy Rewind. Its goal is to bring these "zombie" images back to life so that astronomers can find them online and compare them with modern electronic data from ground- ... read more