Daily Mail By Mark Prigg 1/15/2019
Premier camera was shut down because of a hardware problem
Hubble's three other science instruments are still working
Wide field camera was installed by spacewalking astronauts in 2009It may be the classic response from IT departments around the world, but turning it off and on again really does work - even for the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA has confirmed that resetting the aging telescope's main camera appears to have fixed an issue that left it offline.
Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, suspended operations on Tuesday, Jan. 8th as a result.
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 said.
The instrument autonomously suspended its operations as a safety precaution.
Upon further investigation, the voltage levels appeared to be within normal range, and 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.
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.
Hubble's three other science instruments are still working fine, with celestial observations continuing.
More:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6596513/Switching-DOES-work-NASA-reveals-reset-fixed-Hubble-Space-telescope.html