On Tuesday, NASA announced that the NIRISS instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope was experiencing issues and as a result out of service. This comes just a month after Webb experienced issues with its attitude control system - should we be concerned?

What's Happening

NASA issued a statement on Tuesday stating Webb's NIRISS instrument "experienced a communications delay within the instrument, causing its flight software to time out.", further adding "The instrument is currently unavailable for science observations while NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) work together to determine and correct the root cause of the delay.".

What Is NIRISS?

The Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument is a contribution from the Canadian Space Agency which enables scientists to determine the composition of exoplanets' atmospheres, observe distant galaxies, and examine objects that are close together.

Teams at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and at the Canadian Space Agency are actively troubleshooting the issue to find the root cause, and the solution.

In the same statement as previously mentioned, NASA reports There is no indication of any danger to the hardware, and the observatory and other instruments are all in good health. The affected science observations will be rescheduled.

December's Anomaly

On December 7th, 2022, Webb's instruments went into a safe mode lasting for a total of 13 days due to "a software fault triggered in the attitude control system, which controls the pointing of the observatory.", an extremely critical system for the observatory.

The observatory exited its safe mode on December 20th, however, this begs the question - is Webb already showing its age? Are these issues going to become the new normal?

Despite these issues, Webb has been performing at or above expectations and providing not only beautiful imagery but groundbreaking scientific data since entering science operations last year.