Strange Issues Continue with NASA Space Telescopes, Two Go into Safemode

You will likely recall not too long ago there was the sudden and secretive shutdown of the Sunspot Observatory in New Mexico which was followed by the temporarily shut down of the live cams of 6 more observatories, and just days ago there was the Soyuz mission launch failure, next the Hubble Telescope goes offline and now the Chandra x-ray telescope goes offline.

So is there something going on?

According to a news report NASA said that the Hubble Space Telescope has entered safe mode after a gyroscope failure, the agency’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has now gone into a similar protective state.

NASA announced the issue Friday, though it happened on Wednesday. When Chandra enters safe mode, it swaps over to hardware backup units, orients its solar panels to gather maximum sunlight and points its mirrors away from the sun.

Instruments go into safe mode to protect themselves during hardware or software failures or glitches, leaving only essential survival systems operating. The space agency is now investigating the cause of the safe-mode transition.

Chandra is designed to make X-ray observations of distant space features, including quasars, supernovas and black holes. It’s part of NASA’s Great Observatories program, which includes Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

It seems highly unlikely that both NASA’s craft are going into safe mode within days, and given the many recent incidents it doesn’t seem to be just coincidence.

Also noteworthy, NASA has already lost contact with the Opportunity Mars Rover and they have a big issue with a data transmission with the Curiosity Mars Rover mainly due to a massive sandstorm on the planet Mars.

Perhaps there be something serious going on in space that they don’t want us to see.