NASA Struggles to Fix Failure of Hubble Space Telescope’s 1980s Computer

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Hubble Space Telescope in Orbit

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The Hubble Space Telescope was introduced by the area shuttle bus Discovery on April 24, 1990. Avoiding distortions of the environment, Hubble has an unblocked view peering to worlds, stars, and galaxies, some more than 13.4 billion light-years away. Credit: NASA

NASA continues to deal with fixing a problem with the payload computer system on the Hubble Space Telescope. The operations group will be running tests and gathering more info on the system to even more separate the issue. The science instruments will stay in a safe mode state up until the concern is fixed. The telescope itself and science instruments stay in great health.

The computer system stopped on Sunday, June 13. An effort to reboot the computer system stopped working on Monday, June 14. Initial signs indicated a degrading computer system memory module as the source of the computer system stop. When the operations group tried to change to a back-up memory module, nevertheless, the command to start the backup module stopped working to finish. Another effort was performed on both modules Thursday night to get more diagnostic info while once again attempting to bring those memory modules online. However, those efforts were not effective.

The payload computer system is a NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system integrated in the 1980s that lies on the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling system. The computer system’s function is to manage and collaborate the science instruments and monitor them for health and wellness functions. It is completely redundant because a 2nd computer system, in addition to its associated hardware, exists on orbit that can be switched to in case of an issue. Both computer systems can access and utilize any of 4 independent memory modules, which each include 64K of Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) memory. The payload computer system utilizes just one memory module operationally at a time, with the other 3 acting as backups.

Launched in 1990, Hubble has actually contributed significantly to our understanding of deep space over the past 30 years.