A Glitch Has Knocked the Hubble Space Telescope Offline–for Now

It turns out it’s tricky to troubleshoot a 1980s computer that’s dashing around Earth hundreds of miles over our heads.

NASA has spent more than a week evaluating a computer issue that put the venerable Hubble Space Telescope out of commission on June 13 and that may force the spacecraft to turn to its backup computer. Now, ongoing tests suggest that the issue the team has identified so far may not be at the root of the computer’s problems, according to an update from the agency.

“After performing tests on several of the computer’s memory modules, the results indicate that a different piece of computer hardware may have caused the problem, with the memory errors being only a symptom,” NASA officials wrote in a statement published Tuesday (June 22).