The Hubble Space Telescope has been an inspiring achievement in many of our childhoods.  Launched in 1990, it has been collecting mind-blowing images of the cosmos for nearly three decades.  Unfortunately, on October 5th, 2018, the inevitable happened to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope is named after Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer known for discoveries such as the Andromeda galaxy and the fact that the universe is expanding at a rate now known as “The Hubble Constant”.  Even though the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, it had initial issues preventing it from taking effective observations.  After a service mission in 1993, the Hubble began taking wondrous pictures of the cosmos and beyond.

The Hubble has a total of six gyroscopes, all of which assist in turning and stabilizing the telescope when it is observing distant objects.  These six gyroscopes were installed in a service mission in May of 2009.  Three of these gyroscopes were standard operating gyroscopes, but the other three were structurally enhanced to provide longer operating times without failure.  While these six gyroscopes were only supposed to last until 2015, the Hubble still had all three enhanced gyroscopes operational as of this fall.

However, last Friday, one of the three remaining gyroscopes failed inside of the Hubble Space Telescope.  While the Hubble is still operational, it brings to the table serious concerns about the long-term uses of the telescope.  

Death of a Star – The Rotting Egg

When this gyroscope shut down, the Hubble entered a safe mode where the telescope flies freely through space without rotating.  The current plan is to work with the failed gyroscope to determine whether it can be reactivated.  Fortunately, even if this gyroscope does not come back online, there is still hope for the Hubble in the near future.

If the malfunctioning gyroscope cannot be salvaged, the current plan of operation for the Hubble is to use just a single gyroscope at a time.  While it operates ideally with at least three gyroscopes, the Hubble is technically able to operate with just a single gyroscope without losing a significant amount of scientific data.  NASA wishes to take this approach to squeeze as much life out of the remaining gyroscopes as possible.

While the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to be the Hubble’s replacement, I personally believe it is valuable to keep the Hubble operational.  To start, the James Webb Space Telescope already had issues which delayed its launch until 2021.  It is impossible to know what obstacles could inhibit the correct deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Hubble is already positioned correctly in orbit.  The Hubble – specifically the gyroscopes – have already been repaired before, and the telescope has provided countless amazing discoveries.  Like the saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”, I think is more effective to repair something we have already repaired before instead of scrapping it entirely and moving to something different.