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from the trying-to-put-a-good-spin-on-things dept.
Hubble telescope hit by mechanical failure
The Hubble Space Telescope is operating with only essential functions after it lost one of three gyroscopes needed to point the spacecraft. The observatory, described as one of the most important scientific instruments ever created, was placed in "safe mode" over the weekend, while scientists try to fix the problem. Hubble had been operating with four of its six gyroscopes when another failed on Friday.
[...] Operators will now try to revive a gyroscope that malfunctioned when flight controllers tried to bring it online to replace the failed one.
At any given time, Hubble needs three of its gyroscopes to work for optimal efficiency. If the "misbehaving" gyroscope turns out not to work, the orbiting observatory may have to operate on one. This would conserve the remaining gyros for as long as possible, but would restrict the telescope somewhat.
Dr Rachel Osten, deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope, tweeted: "Very stressful weekend. Right now HST is in safe mode while we figure out what to do. Another gyro failed. First step is try to bring back the last gyro, which had been off, and is being problematic."
Also at Space.com.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday October 09 2018, @12:27PM
Or maybe rephrased with 3 to 6 gyros you can take as long of a photo as you want as long as the sun or earth don't pass thru the image LOL. But with 1 gyro everything is going to appear as a short arc, so you gotta take 100 short photos and stack them, which will burn a lot of bandwidth.
There are a lot of boring technical arguments about which photo strategy is better, but generally a single long duration photo will win, given they designed the CCDs on the hubble to optimize for that.