NASA’s aging Hubble Space Telescope still in safe mode as glitch fixes falter – CNET [CNET]

The Hubble Space Telescope has spent over three decades bringing us glorious images and data, but the spacecraft is showing its age. The Hubble team is continuing to troubleshoot a problem with the aging telescope’s payload computer — a piece of hardware built in the 1980s — that controls its science instruments.

The computer issue cropped up on June 13. “After analyzing the data, the Hubble operations team is investigating whether a degrading memory module led to the computer halt,” NASA said in a statement last week. Hubble is a joint project from NASA and the European Space Agency.

In a Friday update, NASA said the telescope is healthy, but the science instruments remain in safe mode. The Hubble team already tried restarting the payload computer, but encountered the same glitch again. The team tried switching over to a backup module, but the command failed to complete. Another attempt wasn’t successful. 

“The operations team will be running tests and collecting more information on the system to further isolate the problem,” the agency said.  

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The telescope has weathered a series of technical glitches in recent years. A software error sent it into safe mode for several days in March.

Hubble has been remarkably resilient as scientists wait for the much-delayed next-generation James Webb Space Telescope to launch, hopefully later this year. James Webb will continue to expand on Hubble’s legacy. 

If past efforts are any indication, Hubble could possibly persevere past this latest problem and resume its valuable science operations, but NASA is also facing the reality of working with old systems that have long outlasted expectations.

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