Space
20:58, 16-Oct-2018
NASA X-ray Space Telescope back online after brief shutdown
Updated
21:00, 19-Oct-2018
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One of NASA's space telescopes is back in business after a two-day shutdown.
The US space agency NASA said Monday that the Chandra X-ray Observatory came back online Friday. Chandra's trouble occurred less than a week after the Hubble Space Telescope was sidelined. In both cases, the problem was in the pointing system.
Officials said a glitch in one of Chandra's gyroscopes generated three seconds of bad computer data last Wednesday. That was enough for the 19-year-old telescope to go into a so-called safe mode, during which science observations cease. Flight controllers restored Chandra's pointing by switching to a backup gyroscope.
Observations are expected to resume with Chandra by the end of this week. Hubble, meanwhile, remains out of action with a more serious gyroscope issue that cropped up October 5.
(Cover: Illustration of the Chandra X-ray Observatory in Earth orbit. /Photo courtesy of NASA)
Source(s): AP