The Hubble Space Telescope’s wide-field planetary camera, which astronomers have come to think of as an essential research tool, could be back in business as early as tomorrow now that the telescope’s managers have succeeded in switching on a backup computer that formats data for transmission to earth.
According to reports in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center were able to boot up the backup machine — unused for the past 18 years — after a couple of false starts. The wide-field planetary camera, the telescope’s main imaging device, could resume sending pictures as early as tomorrow, NASA officials said.
The Hubble Space Telescope, carried into space aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1990, has long outlived its expected lifespan. But outcries from astronomers and others recently persuaded the space agency to plan one more repair mission, expected to take place next year, that would allow researchers another six years’ use of the telescope. —Lawrence Biemiller
