Repair

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful next-generation space telescope in human history, is experiencing a series of failures.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on the 24th (local time) that an error occurred in the ‘NIRISS’ function installed in the JWST.

NIRISS stands for ‘Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph’. NIRISS was used to observe the planet WASP-96, which was released by NASA in July last year. WASP-96 is a gas giant and is about 1150 light-years from Earth (a light-year is the distance that light travels in a year, about 9.46 trillion km).

Scientists first discovered WASP-96 in 2014. At that time, it was found that the orbital period was 3.5 days and the temperature was over 538 degrees Celsius, but atmospheric information was not obtained. Using NIRISS on JWST, it was possible to reveal the presence of clouds, haze, and water in the atmosphere of WASP-96.

NIRISS is currently experiencing communication delays. Due to a problem on the software side, it is currently unable to perform its mission. NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which participated in the development of NIRISS, are together looking for the cause of the communication delay. NASA said, “No hardware problems were found,” and “there are no problems with other devices in the JWST.”

This failure is not the first time it has occurred one year after arriving at the second Lagrangian point, which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and is the mission area. In December of last year, a glitch occurred in the JWST attitude control system. Because of this, JWST stopped its mission for about two weeks and went through flaw fixes.

It is difficult to bring a space telescope back to Earth and repair it. The Hubble Space Telescope, which was active before JWST, also broke down, and NASA has repaired the Hubble Space Telescope by launching space shuttles about five times.