Earth’s most powerful telescopes are beginning to show the strain of decades of use and may soon stop working completely.
Astronomical observatories such as Hubble and Chandra were launched into orbit several years ago and have provided us with stunning images and precious data ever since.
These wondrous machines, that have been invaluable in the advancement of modern science, are deteriorating with age and Nasa has no plan in place to replace the ailing technology.
They were developed to help map distant galaxies, peer into black holes and locate new planets but astronomers fear their eyes in the sky may soon go dark.
‘The unwillingness to invest in substantial science has begun to worry us,’ astrophysicist Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates the Hubble telescope on behalf of NASA, told The Washington Post.
‘We’re facing a very daunting prospect as a community. Some fields just won’t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.’
Funding for successors to these marquee telescopes has yet to be secured and Paul Hertz, the astrophysics division director at Nasa said it is a ‘choice for the nation’.
‘What missions we do will be influenced by priorities of the community as well as the funding choices made by the political system,’ he added.
Hubble was launched in 1990 and earlier this month it malfunctioned, halting its work and reinforced to the scientists that are totally dependent on the 28-year-old machine just how reliant they are on technology first designed in the 1970s.
The Chandra X-ray telescope is now in its 20th year of operation and has surpassed its projected operational lifespan by nearly 15 years.
Chandra automatically went into so-called safe mode earlier this month, because of a gyroscope problem.
‘The cause of Chandra’s safe mode on October 10 has now been understood and the Operations team has successfully returned the spacecraft to its normal pointing mode,’ Nasa said.
It claimed the safe mode was caused by a glitch in one of Chandra’s gyroscopes resulting in a three-second period of bad data that in turn led the on-board computer to calculate an incorrect value for the spacecraft momentum.
The erroneous momentum indication then triggered the safe mode.
‘The team has completed plans to switch gyroscopes and place the gyroscope that experienced the glitch in reserve,’ Nasa said.
Hubble went into hibernation due to a similar gyroscope failure.
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