NASA has recovered the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument, which suspended operations on Thursday, Feb. 28. The final tests were conducted and the instrument was brought back to its operational mode on March 6.
At 8:31 p.m. EST on Feb. 28, the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suspended operations after an error was detected as the instrument was performing a routine boot procedure. The error indicated that software inside the camera had not loaded correctly in a small section of computer memory. The Hubble operations team ran repeated tests to reload the memory and check the entire process. No errors have been detected since the initial incident, and it appears that all circuits, computer memory and processors that are part of that boot process are now operating normally. The instrument has now been brought back to its standard operating mode for normal operations.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed in 2002 and repaired during the last servicing mission to Hubble back in 2009 after a power supply failure. More than 5,500 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published from its data, and it is credited with some of Hubble’s most iconic images, including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the farthest look into the universe at that time.
Hubble itself is in its 29th year of operations, well surpassing its original 15-year lifetime. With its primary and backup systems, it is expected that Hubble will operate simultaneously with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to obtain multiwavelength observations of astronomical objects. Scheduled to launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to see near- and mid-infrared light while Hubble is optimized for ultraviolet and visible light.
For more information about Hubble, visit:
March 1, 2019 – Advanced Camera for Surveys Anomaly on Hubble Space Telescope
At 8:31 p.m. EST on Feb. 28, the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suspended operations after an error was detected as the instrument was performing a routine boot procedure. The error indicated that software inside the camera had not loaded correctly. A team of instrument system engineers, flight software experts and flight operations personnel quickly organized to download and analyze instrument diagnostic information. This team is currently working to identify the root cause and then to construct a recovery plan.
The telescope continues to operate normally, executing observations with the other three science instruments — the Wide Field Camera 3, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph — that are all performing nominally. There are no critical observations using the Advanced Camera for Surveys scheduled for the remainder of this week or next week, and the observations that were planned over the next two weeks can be easily rescheduled.
Originally required to last 15 years, Hubble has now been operating for more than 28 years. The final servicing mission in 2009, expected to extend Hubble’s lifetime an additional five years, has now produced more than nine years of science observations. During that servicing mission, astronauts repaired the Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed in 2002, after its power supply failed in 2007.
For more information about Hubble, visit:
For media inquiries, contact:
Elizabeth Landau
Office of Communications
NASA Headquarters, Washington D.C.
Elizabeth.r.landau@jpl.nasa.gov
Claire Saravia Andreoli
Office of Communications
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov