Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 Recovered, Collecting Science Data

MessageToEagle.com – NASA informs that the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) was brought back to full operational status and completed its first science observations just after noon EST today, Jan. 17.

The instrument autonomously shut down on Jan. 8 after internal data erroneously indicated invalid voltage levels.

The Wide Field Camera 3 was installed on Hubble in May 2009 during the last servicing mission. It has taken over 240,000 observations to date and is the most used instrument of Hubble’s current complement.

Hubble Space Telescope is in its 29^th year of operations, well surpassing its original 15-year lifetime.

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NASA has moved closer to conducting science operations again with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, which suspended operations on Tuesday, Jan. 8. Today, Jan. 15, the instrument was brought back to its operations mode.

“Shortly after noon EST on Jan. 8, software installed on the Wide Field Camera 3 detected that some voltage levels within the instrument were out of the predefined range,” NASA reported on the website.

“The instrument autonomously suspended its operations as a safety precaution. Upon further investigation, the voltage levels appeared to be within normal range, yet the engineering data within the telemetry circuits for those voltage levels were not accurate. In addition, all other telemetry within those circuits also contained erroneous values indicating that this was a telemetry issue and not a power supply issue.

“After resetting the telemetry circuits and associated boards, additional engineering data were collected and the instrument was brought back to operations. All values were normal. Additional calibration and tests will be run over the next 48 to 72 hours to ensure that the instrument is operating properly. Further investigation using both the new and the previously collected engineering data will be conducted to determine why those data values were originally incorrect.

“Assuming that all tests work as planned, it is expected that the Wide Field Camera 3 will start to collect science images again by the end of the week…”

For more information about Hubble, visit:

www.nasa.gov/hubble

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