NASA announced in a statement last Wednesday that the Webb Space Telescope's instruments have been in safe mode intermittently since December, however, scientific operations resumed at the beginning of the week. During this period of safe mode, all of Webb's non-essential systems were shut down several times, meaning that no scientific operations were active and, of course, making it impossible to carry out any observations. The US aerospace agency has since announced that the problem has been resolved.
Valued at more than 10 billion dollars, the main purpose of the "Webb" telescope is not only to observe stars, but also to study the evolution of galaxies and the formation processes of these stars and planets, using infrared wavelengths.
From NASA's press release, it is also possible to understand that this bug was responsible for activating the attitude control system, which guides the direction in which this observatory should be pointed.
The continuation of the original article via Gizmodo can be read here.
