Another NASA space telescope shuts down in orbit

Another NASA space telescope has close down and halted scholarship observations.

Less than a week after a Hubble Space Telescope went offline, a Chandra X-ray Observatory did a same. NASA pronounced Friday that Chandra automatically went into supposed protected mode Wednesday, presumably since of a gyroscope problem.

At ~9:55 a.m. EDT on Oct. 10, 2018, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory entered protected mode. Analysis indicates a transition to protected mode was normal function for such an event. All systems functioned as approaching and a systematic instruments are safe.

mdash;@chandraxray

Hubble went into hibernation on Oct. 5 due to a gyroscope failure.

Both orbiting observatories are aged and in well-extended missions: Hubble is 28, while Chandra is 19. Flight controllers are operative to resume operations with both.

NASA pronounced it’s coincidental both went “asleep” within a week of one another. An astronomer who works on Chandra, Jonathan McDowell of a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted Friday that “Chandra motionless that if Hubble could have a small vacation, it wanted one, too.”

My heading speculation is that Chandra motionless that if Hubble could have a small vacation, it wanted one too.

mdash;@planet4589

Launched by space shuttles in a 1990s, Hubble and Chandra are partial of NASA’s Great Observatories series. The others are a Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, that was also launched in a 1990s though eventually unsuccessful and was destroyed, and a Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003 and still working. Each was dictated to observe a creation in opposite wavelengths.

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/chandra-space-telescope-shutdown-1.4549217?cmp=rss