Hubble Resurrected….and then it died again

As many of you probably know, the Hubble Space Telescope has been silent for a few weeks now due to a computer malfunction in the equipment responsible for sending data to earth. A maitenance mission that were to leave for Hubble on October 14th has been postponed until next year as a result. On October 14th, NASA announced that they would try to bring Hubbles backup circuits back to life, and it’s now been confirmed that they were successful in doing this, and Hubble lives again. However, NASA do not think they will be able to bring the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer back to life again before the postponed service mission, now scheduled to depart in February 2009. 

Credit: NASA/STScI

 

Edit: It seems NASA encountered a set of unforeseen problems when trying to bypass the faulty circuit, so Hubble’s internal sensors put it in a so-called “safe mode”. The technicians are talking about maybe using a hybrid of the faulty and backup equipment to solve these problems.