NASA: Hubble is Back to “Full Science Operations”

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It looks like everything is back to normal with the Hubble space telescope.

Hubble Space Telescope above earth's atmosphere
Photo by NASA

As you might recall from some of our previous articles, NASA has had a time of it lately trying to get the venerable spacecraft back to full operational capacity. Today, in a blog post on their website, NASA announced that they achieved just that.

What did that involve? Getting Hubble’s instrumentation back online, specifically the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. For an overview of Hubble, you can check out this neat diagram over on NASA’s website.

The addition of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph means that Hubble is now operating with all four scientific instruments. But NASA’s work isn’t stopping there; the organization plans on rolling out some updates starting in mid-December that will help them accommodate such loss of functionality – and recover from it more easily – in the future should it happen again.

As the blog post notes, Hubble has worked for more than 31 years and plans on continuing into the future if possible. With the launch of the Webb Telescope later this month, NASA sees a bright, collaborative future between the two and, now, with the scientific instruments back online, that seems more possible than it did a month ago. Hubble has had a few close calls in the past, but no one was quite writing it off like they were this last go around. Here’s to hoping it’s around for another thirty years.

As always, we’d love to know what you think of NASA’s latest efforts with Hubble and otherwise. Do you have a favorite Hubble photograph? Let us know in the comments.

Check out our other photography news on Light Stalking at this link right here.

[NASA]

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Kehl is our staff photography news writer since 2017 and has over a decade of experience in online media and publishing and you can get to know him better here and follow him on Insta.

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