The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 is once again operational after issues earlier this month caused the camera to suddenly stop observations.
On Jan. 8, the telescope’s camera abruptly stopped working when it detected voltage levels outside of the expected range. That set engineers searching for what caused the problem. After investigating the issue, the team ended up finding that the voltage levels inside the camera were actually normal. Instead, data in the instrument’s telemetry circuits wasn’t accurate. And all of the instrument’s other telemetry circuits also had bad data.
With these findings, the team concluded that there was a telemetry issue with the camera and the actual voltage inside the camera was just fine. So the team reset the camera’s telemetry circuits, confirmed the instrument was working properly, and brought the camera “back to life” on Jan. 15. According to a statement from NASA, further investigation will ...
