'I feel super excited and relieved,' Tull said after making the hardware switch. Now the telescope is back in full observation mode. So engineers switched all the faulty parts to that backup hardware. Each piece of Hubble's hardware has a twin pre-installed on the telescope in case it fails. The PCU could have been sending the wrong voltage of electricity to the computer, or the failsafe itself could have been malfunctioning.
Engineers suspect that a failsafe on the telescope's Power Control Unit (PCU) instructed the payload computer to shut down. It's still not totally clear which piece of hardware was the culprit.
Nzinga Tull, Hubble systems anomaly response manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, works in the control room July 15 to restore Hubble to full science operations. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
