Back when I was in the tenth grade, the Space Shuttle Discovery carried one of the first Great Observatories into orbit: the Hubble Space Telescope. And we very quickly learned that the telescope had issues. Built in the 1980s and delayed in its launch by the Challenger accident in 1986, this telescope was already carrying an old computer when it finally launched. It was also carrying a flawed mirror, but we figured out how to fix that with corrective lenses, so no big deal. 

The scope entered its prime in my second year of university, with the first Hubble servicing mission, and for my entire professional life, I’ve benefited from the data this spectacular piece of engineering has been able to send back to Earth. And we’ve gotten to benefit from this telescope far longer than anyone ever expected.

Hubble was designed to fit into the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay and be flown back and forth from space for regular servicing. After the Challenger accident, that process was deemed unsafe, and after Columbia was lost at the beginning of this century, NASA didn’t really want to even send a space shuttle up as high as Hubble’s orbit. The plan was, as soon as JWST was up and operating, Hubble would retire, knowing its legacy of science had safely passed to a new set of mirrors.

JWST kind of missed its 2007 launch and its 2010 launch, and now it’s 2021, and JWST is still on the ground.

To allow Hubble to keep working engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute had to figure out how to time and time again update the Hubble without bringing it home, and then everyone, including folks like you, had to petition and plead for one final mission to give it new life before the Space Shuttle program was retired. Back in May 2009, we got that last servicing mission, and it was hoped we’d get a few more years of science. More than a decade later, we have been continuing to get great science.

But on Sunday, Hubble shut itself down when an error occurred in one of its original, circa-1980 computers. As the Voyager missions have proven, NASA computers are a lot more reliable than your average laptop, but at 30? Didn’t we all start feeling a little bit more tired at 30? 

Engineers are in communications with the spacecraft and the problem seems to be in a degraded memory module; attempts are being made to switch over to a backup module. According to the NASA Goddard operations team: Assuming that this problem is corrected via one of the many options available to the operations team, Hubble is expected to continue yielding amazing discoveries into the late 2020s or beyond.

I’m glad that this statement seems to indicate there are no longer plans to retire Hubble as soon as JWST is up unless, of course, they are hinting JWST won’t launch until the late 2020s, but this is a big if, and the team went on to add: …there is no definitive timeline yet as to when this will be completed, tested and brought back to operational status.

We here at the Daily Space would like to wish the team godspeed in getting Hubble operational again. We are not yet ready for it to pass into that long dark void.

More Information

NASA Goddard press release