NASA fixed the James Webb's important instrument that was malfunctioning

(NASA-GSFC, Adriana M. Gutierrez (CI Lab) https://bit.ly/3XIfF8V)

Good news for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The observatory's NIRISS instrument has resumed full-fledged scientific observations after a two-week downtime due to a malfunction.

NASA experts determined that the cause of the failure was a particle of cosmic rays entering the electronics of the large instrument.

The JWST has been in space for more than a year, during which time it has already experienced 3 failures.

The first, which occurred in the fall of 2022, was associated with increased friction in the bearings of the MIRI tool.

This led to the tool being put in a limited mode for two months.

The second failure, which took place in December last year, affected the control system of the observatory, due to which the telescope constantly went into safe mode.

Then, on January 15, 2023, the third failure occurred when the software of the NIRISS instrument failed.

The failure included a camera and a spectrograph, and you could read more about it in the article I wrote one week ago (link below).

The device did not work until January 28, during which time the engineers found out that the cause of the problems was the ingress of a particle of galactic cosmic rays into the field-programmable gate array.

The device was rebooted, and then it was given the command to conduct trial observations.

Finally, on January 30, NASA experts determined that the observations were successful and NIRISS returned to full-fledged scientific work.

Sources:

• NASA: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/
• Steemit: https://steemit.com/hive-109160/@sarahjay1/james-webb-s-important-instrument-had-a-software-glitch-and-stopped-operating

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#science #space #jameswebb #astronomy #iteach #news #nftmc