One of NASA's space telescopes is back in business after a two-day shutdown.&nbsp;

NASA said Monday that the Chandra X-ray Observatory came back online Friday. Chandra's trouble occurred less than a week after the

. In both cases, the problem was in the pointing system.

Update! Chandra operations resume after cause of safe mode identified: our Operations team has successfully returned the spacecraft to its normal pointing mode. After software reconfiguration, we will return to science operations soon. <a href="https://t.co/68Q1plKHOP">https://t.co/68Q1plKHOP</a> <a href="https://t.co/Inld39cSTV">pic.twitter.com/Inld39cSTV</a>

Officials say a glitch in one of Chandra's gyroscopes generated three seconds of bad computer data last Wednesday. That was enough for the 19-year-old telescope to go into so-called safe mode, during which science observations cease. Flight controllers restored Chandra's pointing by switching to a backup gyroscope.&nbsp;

Centre of Milky Way home to 10,000 black holes, study suggests

At the centre of our galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, about 4 million times the mass of our sun. But it's not alone.

The ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, during observations. The Milky Way, our own galaxy, stretches across the picture: it is a disc-shaped  structure seen perfectly edge-on. Above the telescope´s dome, here  lit by the Moon, and partially hidden behind dark dust clouds, is  the yellowish and prominent central bulge of the Milky Way. The whole  plane of the galaxy is populated by about a hundred thousand million stars, as  well as significant amounts of interstellar gas and dusts. The dust  absorbs visible light and reemits it at longer wavelength, appearing  totally opaque at our eyes. The ancient Andean civilizations saw in  these dark lanes their animal-shaped constellations. By following the  dark lane which seems to grow from the centre of the Galaxy toward the  top, we find the reddish nebula around Antares (Alpha Scorpii). The  Galactic Centre itself lies in the constellation of Sagittarius and  reaches its maximum visibility during the austral winter season. The ESO  3.6-metre telescope, inaugurated in 1976, currently operates with the  HARPS spectrograph, the most precise exoplanet “hunter” in the world.  Located 600 km north of Santiago, at 2400 metres altitude in the outskirts of  the Chilean Atacama Desert, La Silla was first ESO site in Chile and  the largest observatory of its time. This photograph was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Serge Brunier. Links  ESO Photo Ambassadors webpage. 

Galactic centre and bulge above the ESO 3.6-metre telescope

The 3.6-metre European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla is shadowed by the galactic bulge of the Milky Way. At the centre lies a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, and new research has found dozens of surrounding black holes suggesting upwards of 10,000 more could be present.

Astronomers spy nearby star that could be eating a planet

A nearby baby star suddenly started looking a bit strange last year. Now astronomers think they know why -- it's in the process of eating a planet.

This illustration provided by NASA depicts debris surrounding the star RW Aur A, about 450 light-years away from the Earth. In the Wednesday, July 18, 2018 edition of the Astronomical Journal, astronomers said they may have caught the star munching on a planet or mini-planets.

Planet Munching

Observations are expected to resume with Chandra by the end of this week. Hubble, meanwhile, remains out of action with a more serious gyroscope issue that cropped up Oct. 5.

My leading theory is that Chandra decided that if Hubble could have a little vacation, it wanted one too.

Launched by space shuttles in the 1990s, Hubble and Chandra are part of NASA's Great Observatories series. The others are the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which was also launched in the 1990s but eventually failed and was destroyed, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003 and still working. Each was intended to observe the cosmos in different wavelengths.

This illustration made available by NASA shows the Chandra X-ray Observatory. On Friday, the space agency said that the telescope automatically went into so-called safe mode last Wednesday, possibly because of a gyroscope problem. 

NASA space telescope back in business after 2-day shutdown

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