Another Hubble setback
2008-10-18 14:39
Cape Canaveral - A new glitch has
shut down the Hubble Space Telescope, dashing Nasa's hopes of a
speedy recovery from an earlier computer breakdown, officials
said on Friday.
"The soonest that we would be back doing full science would
be late next week," Art Whipple, Hubble manager at Nasa's
Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, told
reporters during a conference call on Friday.
The space telescope, which orbits about 485 km
above Earth, has changed scientists' understanding of the
origin, evolution and contents of the universe and delivered
unprecedented images of distant galaxies and celestial
phenomena.
A computer needed to relay science data to Earth failed
three weeks ago, prompting Nasa to delay a long-awaited space
shuttle servicing mission scheduled for October 14 so that new
gear could be prepared to fly. The flight has been rescheduled
for February.
On Thursday, engineers successfully switched the
observatory over to a backup computer and three instruments had
reactivated when the first of two new glitches surfaced. The
first involved a power unit on one of Hubble's cameras and the
second was a problem with another computer system used by the
science instruments.
"It's not known if these two events are related," Whipple
said. "At this point we are fairly certain it was not a
configuration or a commanding error."
Officials said it was too early to say if more work will be
needed when astronauts arrive at the observatory for its fifth
and final servicing mission.
"If we did not have the servicing mission, we would have
less options to us available for recovery but we never take
that for granted," Whipple said.
- Reuters