NASA is preparing to move to backup hardware while the Hubble problem persists.

The Hubble Space Telescope is deployed on April 25, 1990 from the space shuttle Discovery. Avoiding distortions of the atmosphere, Hubble has an unobstructed view peering to planets, stars and galaxies, some more than 13.4 billion light years away.

The computer difficulties that have plagued the Hubble Space Telescope have persisted this week, with NASA prepared to switch to backup hardware to address the problem.

Hubble's issues began in June, when the payload computer that controls the orbiting telescope's scientific instruments went offline. When this happened, all of the instruments went into safe mode, which means they are still healthy and working, but they aren't gathering data at the moment.

The NASA team on the ground went through numerous rounds of troubleshooting to figure out what was causing the issue. According to the most recent NASA report, the fault is in a unit called Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH), which contains numerous pieces of hardware that could be the cause of the malfunction.

In an update, NASA outlines the next steps: “The Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF), which communicates and formats commands and data, is now under investigation by the team. They're also looking at a power regulator in the Power Control Unit, which is designed to keep the payload computer's hardware at a constant voltage.”

If one of these systems proves to be the source of the problem, the solution is to switch from the current units to the backups. Most Hubble hardware has both primary and backup versions, allowing the team to move from one to the other if something goes wrong with one. Switching to backup units, on the other hand, might be a difficult operation. Several pieces of hardware must be turned off before the backup CU/SDF or power regulator can be switched on due to the way the systems are coupled.

The team is ready to transfer to backup hardware this week, including utilising a simulator to test the operation. The good news is that this isn't the first time something like this has been done. “A similar swap was done in 2008, allowing Hubble to resume normal science operations when a CU/SDF module failed,” NASA noted. “In 2009, a servicing mission replaced the entire SI C&DH unit, including the malfunctioning CU/SDF module, with the current SI C&DH unit.”

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