Hubble telescope’s data transmitter has failed; questions raised over whether to repair & upgrade it.
The primary data format encoder onboard the Hubble Space Telescope has failed which has lead to people asking whether it’s worth repairing. Again. Well, let’s cut right to the chase on this one: Yes, it is. Since putting it into orbit in April 1990, the Hubble has been critical to a number of discoveries as well as pushing our awareness of celestial events in general out exponentially. Ugrades to the scope’s capability were always intended and the Hubble’s design was specifically formulated to allow them. This has already been done on a number of occasions and, while no spacewalk should be considered “easy”, the upgrade process is relatively straightforward.
In this particular case, the data formatter that failed is the primary “A-side” unit that allows the collected data to be transmitted back to Earth. The story does go into the fact that this is a redundant system and the “B-side” unit will pick up this function, as intended. That tends to make the arguments to allow the Hubble to degrade because we’ve “lost” this system rather uncompelling. To the contrary, there’s a mission already scheduled to perform other upgrades to Hubble that would provide the opportunity to replace this unit and get (perhaps) another 18 years out of it. For the continued availibilty of Hubble’s services,the money spent to perform the repair seems cheap.
