WASHINGTON — The Hubble Space Telescope is working again, taking stunning cosmic photos after a breakdown a month ago. But the good news was quickly tempered by NASA’s announcement Thursday that a mission to upgrade the popular telescope will be delayed at least until May.
A key replacement part that is essential because of the telescope’s failure in September won’t be ready for at least six months.
A repair and upgrade mission to the 18-year-old telescope was nixed a couple of years ago as too risky for the astronauts. But enthusiasm and improved safety measures persuaded NASA’s current chief, Michael Griffin, to go forward with it.
That flight was supposed to happen in mid-October. But the science computer on the telescope unexpectedly shut down, so everything was put on hold. NASA finally was able to get a backup computer system to work in recent days.
But officials can’t count on that backup working indefinitely, so they want astronauts to install an additional system part. That part, in storage since 1991, revealed a “significant” problem during testing, said Hubble program manager Preston Burch. It won’t be ready to fly for at least six months.
The delay also may hinder another, bigger NASA program, its new moon rocket, which NASA hopes to launch by 2015. The space agency needs to spend several years reconfiguring a Kennedy Space Center launch pad for the new moon rocket testing. But that’s the pad the Hubble repair mission will launch from.
For the time being, the $10 billion telescope is as good as it was before it shut down a few weeks ago, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
To prove it, NASA released a glimmering new Hubble photo showing two ring-shaped galaxies after they collided 440 million light-years away.
