Announced 27 Nov, this is Hubble’s stunning first picture after coming out of safe mode.
In the early morning of October 27, 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope targeted a field of galaxies not far from the Great Square in the constellation Pegasus. Contained in the field were star-forming galaxies up to 11 billion light-years away. With the target in its sights, Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 recorded an image. It was the first picture captured by the telescope since it closed its eyes on the universe three weeks earlier, and it was the result of an entire team of engineers and experts working tirelessly to get the telescope exploring the cosmos once again.
"This has been an incredible saga, built upon the heroic efforts of the Hubble team," stated Hubble senior project scientist, Jennifer Wiseman, at NASA Goddard. "Thanks to this work, the Hubble Space Telescope is back to full science capability that will benefit the astronomical community and the public for years to come."
On the evening of Friday, October 5, the orbiting observatory had put itself into "safe mode" after one of its gyroscopes (or "gyros") failed. Hubble stopped taking science observations, oriented its solar panels toward the Sun, and waited for further instructions from the ground.
It was the beginning of a three-day holiday weekend when members of the spacecraft's operations team started receiving text messages on their phone, alerting them that something was wrong with Hubble. In less than an hour, more than a dozen team members had gathered in the control room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to assess the situation. After unsuccessfully reviving the failed gyro, they activated a backup gyro on the spacecraft. However, the gyro soon began reporting impossibly high rotation rates — around 450 degrees per hour, when Hubble was actually turning less than a degree per hour.
"This is something we've never seen before on any other gyros — rates this high," stat