This is a CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor. Behind the Black Bob Zimmerman is here. He's also the biographer of Universe and Amir, which is the story of Hubble. Hubble is now troubled, but, Bob, one gyro mode for Hubble. What does that mean?

You know, you have three dimensions in space.

And so usually with gyroscopes or any kind of control systems, you want to have three

so you can control all three direct dimensions.

And Hubble started out with six gyroscopes when it was first launched, they placed them multiple times on the maintenance missions.

In 09, they put a whole new set in.

That set has been working since then, which is 15 years ago and of those six gyros

three had failed and they now had problems with a fourth and when the fourth one failed

the decision would be with only two left, they would go to what they call one gyro mode, which means they reserve one gyro in, keep it reserved, don't use it, and they use only one gyro to point the telescope which from my perspective is going to

mean they're not going to get good images anymore how do you point this accurately

in that situation so Hubble a week after they started One Gyro Mode, they released an image which I posted

on behind the black of the first image from Hubble after going to One Gyro Mode, and I have

to admit that my pessimism appeared to be wrong. This is a pretty good image.

And in fact, I purposely highlight in the image I post a tiny galaxy in the background at full resolution to show how

good the sharpness of the images relatively and so this is good news this does

appear that at least we're going to get sharp images from Hubble.

We're going to get about 25% less science from the telescope because it takes longer to point the thing with one gyro and get longer

to take images precisely and so there's less data that's going to come down from the

telescope but at least the images have the potential to be sharp. We'll get few of them, but at least they'll be sharp.

All this really tells me is the astronomical community should get its act together and start developing large optical telescopes into space because Hubble

has shown the potential there and they just haven't taken advantage of it.

It's really a shame that the Western astronomers have just not pushed for more optical telescopes in order.

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