On Wednesday (Nov. 29), NASA confirmed that the Hubble Space Telescope, one of humanity's favorite bridges to the cosmos, automatically entered safe mode on Nov. 23. That marks the third time this has happened since Nov. 19. However, mission scientists assure that the observatory remains in good health, and that they're working to resolve the issue and bring Hubble back on again.
The reason for the break in operations lies with issues concerning one of the observatory's gyroscopes. Gyroscopes in general are devices containing either rapidly spinning wheels or circulating beams of light that can help determine whether an object is facing the direction we want it to face. The Hubble Space Telescope's gyroscopes are quite important given the Earth-orbiting observatory is meant to identify and image very specific regions of deep space for scientists to investigate back on the ground. More specifically, they measure the telescope's turn rates, according to a NASA statement, to get those directional readings.
