One of Nasa’s space telescopes is back in business after a two-day shutdown.

Nasa said on Monday that the Chandra X-ray Observatory came back online on Friday.

Chandra’s trouble occurred less than a week after the Hubble Space Telescope was sidelined.

The Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope (Nasa via AP)

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

Officials said 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.

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 on October 5.