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This terminal week has been a rough i for space news, to say the least. The iconic Hubble Space Telescope has been placed in condom mode following a hardware failure, and a Soyuz booster failure caused NASA Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin to abort their trip to the International Space Station. Now, a second NASA satellite is offline post-obit a hardware failure. The Chandra X-ray Observatory shut down on October. 10, and NASA is still assessing the state of affairs to make up one's mind how it can get the satellite operational once again.

Both Hubble and Chandra are function of NASA's Dandy Observatories plan, which originally included iv orbital instruments. Hubble is the most famous because it focused mainly on visible light, and those images are best for public consumption. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory launched in 1991 just a year subsequently Hubble to study gamma rays, but it failed in 2000. The Spitzer Space Telescope launched in 2003 to scan infinite in the infrared, and information technology's still operational. The Chandra 10-ray Observatory went up aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999 and has been investigating distant 10-ray sources ever since.

Chandra doesn't go as much attention every bit Hubble, just it's a vitally of import scientific instrument. Earth'southward atmosphere absorbs X-rays very efficiently, so ground-based observatories aren't an effective way to report them. From space, Chandra uses a serial of angled mirrors to concentrate X-rays on its detection instruments to discover signals 100 times more faint than past X-ray telescopes.

Antennae

The Antennae galaxies, a composite of images from Hubble. the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

According to NASA, Chandra entered safe mode in the early morning time on October. 10. NASA is still looking into the cause, only the team currently believes one of the spacecraft'southward gyroscopes has failed. If that sounds familiar, that'due south also what happened to Hubble terminal week. You may also exist interested to know that gyroscope failure is besides what eventually took down the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory dorsum in 2000. These devices used athwart momentum to track movement, then they're constantly spinning. Eventually, every gyro will fail. Hubble has only lasted this long considering information technology has been serviced several times to become new gyroscopes installed.

Chandra has four pairs of gyroscopes inside, so it's possible NASA will have enough functional hardware to get it fully operational over again. Information technology's unclear if Hubble volition take enough working gyros to operate at full chapters going forward. Even if Chandra doesn't come back at full forcefulness, it's had a good run. It's nineteen years one-time and had an original operational life of five years. NASA says it expects Chandra to continue working for "many years to come up."

Now read: NASA Written report Blames Boeing Mismanagement for SLS Delays, NASA Switches Curiosity Rover to Fill-in Computer Following Glitch, and NASA Sets New Roadmap for Moon Base of operations, Crewed Missions to Mars