TWO’S company, three’s a crowd. That’s the mantra that could buy the Hubble Space Telescope some extra time before NASA brings it down to Earth.
The telescope was designed to use three gyroscopes to point and stabilise itself in space, with three more as back-ups. But the gyros regularly break down, and astronauts have already replaced them twice. Now, the 15-year-old observatory has only four working gyros. Barring any decision to replace them, NASA foresees bringing Hubble down to crash into the ocean after they fail.
However, engineers at NASA have now developed software that would allow the telescope to…
