Hubble is back at work after breakdown

The Hubble Space Telescope is doing science again, three weeks after going out of service due to a gyro failure. In today’s mission update, NASA said the 28-year-old telescope conducted its first science observations since Oct. 5 overnight, focusing on a faraway galaxy. Hubble went into safe mode when one of its three working gyroscopes failed, leaving mission managers with a weighty challenge: They could try getting a glitchy gyro working again, bringing the telescope’s pointing system back to its normal three-gyro mode. Otherwise, they would have to go to a one-gyro procedure for pointing at observational targets, and keep the… Read More