The Webb Space Telescope recovers from the impact of a cosmic ray

31 Jan. () –

The Webb Space Telescope has resumed full operation after experiencing a communications delay on January 15 from an instrument that caused the flight software to be interrupted.

After an exhaustive investigation carried out by teams from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), it was determined that the cause of the failure in the NIRISS spectrograph (Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) “it was probably a galactic cosmic ray”, a form of high-energy radiation from outside our solar system that can sometimes disrupt electrical systems.

The encounter with cosmic rays is a normal and expected part of the operation of any spacecraft. This cosmic ray affected the logic of the solid-state circuits of the NIRISS electronics, known as the Field Programmable Gate Array. Webb engineers decided that restarting the instrument would restore full functionality.

After completing the reset, the NIRISS telemetry data demonstrated normal synchronization, and to fully confirm this, the team scheduled a test observation. On January 28, the Webb team sent commands to the instrument to perform the observation, and the results confirmed on January 30 that NIRISS was back up and running at full scientific capacity.

“NASA and CSA partnered to address the problem in the most technical way possible, through detailed consideration of all areas of the instrument’s operation. They looked at every possible method to safely recover the electronics. When performing the operation “Reviews were performed at each intermediate step. We are now pleased to report that the Webb NIRISS instrument is back online and working optimally,” said it’s a statement Julie Van Campen, a systems engineer for Webb’s Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) at NASA Goddard.