A glitch
with one of the key instruments — an imaging spectrograph — aboard the Hubble
Space Telescope continues to plague the 19-year-old spacecraft after attempts last
week to fix the problem, NASA said today.
Mission managers regrouped today to decide
what their next steps should be to fix the anomaly with the Space Telescope
Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) that caused the Hubble team to suspend the
instrument's operations July 6.
STIS is a super-sensitive
spectrograph that can detect faint light from distant developing galaxies.
The team
made an attempt to fully recover the instrument on July 10, but was unsuccessful.
The team collected diagnostic information on the problem and met today to
review the status of STIS.
"We're
making sure we understand it fully," Ed Ruitberg, a Hubble Program Manager
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.
The team
will meet again later in the week to determine the next course of action. Mission controllers are unsure how long it will take to get STIS back into science-ready
mode.
"We're
not going to turn it fully operational until we know [more about the
problem]," Ruitberg said, though he's optimistic the instrument will fully
recover.
While the
glitch has delayed the preparation of STIS for science operations, "it
doesn't affect the other instruments," Ruitberg said.
The STIS
glitch came a few weeks after a separate glitch that froze the observatory's
new data handling unit, installed by shuttle astronauts in May during the fifth
and final
servicing mission of the telescope. That glitch was resolved
in mid-June.
On a
happier note, a third glitch, with one of Hubble's cameras, was resolved last
week.
Hubble's
Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) suspended operations on June 24 after the
instrument's flight software detected a problem in its new electronics box. Mission controllers were able to revive the camera on July 6.
"We
basically just had to re-initialize the instrument and it came back up and
running," Ruitberg said.
ACS has
finished its Servicing Mission Observatory Verification, or SMOV program, and
is ready to do science, though there's still a chance that the glitch could
occur again. The team is working on mitigation strategies in case that happens,
Ruitberg said.
ACS has
been on Hubble since its launch in 1990 and was revived by the shuttle
astronauts during their 13-day service call.
"Everything
else is going very well," he added.
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