Imagine keeping a laser beam trained on a dime that’s 200 miles away. Now imagine doing that continuously for 24 hours, while riding a merry-go-round. Seem difficult? Well, that’s basically what the Hubble Space Telescope does.
After months of technical issues, NASA announced June 4 that Hubble would shift into one-gyroscope mode. This essentially means that the telescope will have to rely on just one of the several gyroscopes – devices that measure an object’s orientation in space – it normally uses to track and follow objects in space.
Named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, the Hubble telescope launched in 1990 into low Earth orbit. Here, it’s above Earth’s atmosphere, which interferes with the observations from Earth-based telescopes. During its three decades of operation, it has provided us with stunning pictures of distant galaxies and allowed scientists to look closer to the beginning of the universe.
