Not a week passed after the news of Hubble Space Telescope of NASA entering safe mode made headlines, but now it’s the turn of NASA’s Chandra mission that has suffered a major glitch with high possibility due to a technical failure of the gyroscope, the US space agency said.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory was functioning since 1999, observing the universe in high-energy light and now it has gown into protective “safe mode”, interrupting all the scientific observations being carried through it and puts the spacecraft into a stable configuration for the time being.
“At approximately 9:55am EDT on Oct 10, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory entered safe mode. The cause of the safe mode transition (possibly involving a gyroscope) is under investigation,” NASA said in a statement late on Friday.
When the spacecraft is put into safe mode, the observatory is turned in a safe configuration, critical hardware of it is swapped to back-up units, the spacecraft is made to get the maximum sunlight through its solar panels, and the mirrors point away from the Sun.
“Analysis of available data indicates the transition to safe mode was normal behaviour for such an event. All systems functioned as expected and the scientific instruments are safe,” it added.
Chandra was launched back in the year 1999 and as of now it working beyond its originally designed lifetime of 5 years. After a consideration in 2001, NASA extended its lifetime upto 10 years. Now too, the instrument comes under the extended mission and is expected to be continued by carrying out forefront science for many years to come.
However, the US space agency has said that it will try to continue to work by resuming all its related science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope.
On October 5, one of the three gyroscopes (gyros) being used to point and steady the Hubble telescope failed forcing it to enter safe mode. Gyroscopes help spacecraft maintain its proper orientation.
Currently, scientists are performing analyses and tests to enable the determination of all the options available to recover the gyro to operational performance.
But until it recovers, all the science operations with Hubble will remain suspended.
Apart from Chandra and Hubble, NASA’s planet-finder Kepler space telescope is also said to be out of fuel.
Kepler played a key role in finding about 70 percent of all known alien worlds till now.
Another spacecraft of NASA, Dawn, that has been orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres since March 2015, is also said to be almost out of fuel and might fail to function before this month’s end.
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