NASA has announced that it will attempt a 'risky' maneuver to fix its Hubble space telescope that accidentally went offline due to a mysterious failure on June 13.
From the US space agency they believe that the error is in a faulty energy regulator in the Energy Control Unit (PCU) of the computer. They will attempt to switch to a backup PCU which, if successful, will return Hubble to normal science operations in "several days."
The "repair" is tricky because the backup computer, which NASA hopes will solve the problem, had not been turned on since it was installed in 2009 during Hubble's last maintenance mission. Safely switching to a backup unit is also a "very risky process," NASA said previously.
"Someday, a component will fail randomly for which we will not have a backup. That is the most likely way that the Hubble mission will end ," they say from NASA.
Hubble has been observing the universe for more than three decades. Since its launch in April 1990, more than 1.5 million observations of the universe have been made and more than 18,000 scientific papers have been published based on its data. Those observations continue to change our understanding of the universe.
