Prospects were starting to look pretty grim for the venerable Hubble telescope. Following a communications breakdown, the Hubble team postponed their scheduled repair mission from October 14th until this coming February, at the earliest.

Until then, the Hubble's usable data transmission abilities were dependent on one thing: the successfully booting of a 486 backup system, last powered on before the Hubble Launch over 18 years ago.

Well, the Hubble team has now reported that the dusty old computer seems like it's working just fine.



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NASA sees no quick fix for broken Hubble telescope
AP - Sat Oct 18, 5:18 AM ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA's efforts to get the ailing Hubble Space Telescope working again have hit a snag, and engineers are trying to figure out their next step.

Officials had hoped to have the 18-year-old observatory back in business Friday, after it stopped sending pictures three weeks ago. But a pair of problems cropped up Thursday, and now recovery operations are on hold.

It's unclear how long the telescope will be prevented from transmitting its stunning photos of the cosmos.

The soonest it could be operating fully again is late next week, said Art Whipple, a Hubble manager. At worst, the observatory might remain inactive until astronauts arrive with a replacement part next year.

Hubble Space Telescope is alive and clicking


It was a good news, bad news day for NASA on Thursday as space agency managers announced that they had successfully restarted the broken Hubble Space Telescope, but acknowledged that they won't be ready to send a repair team to the 18-year-old instrument until May at the earliest.

NASA officials said the ailing telescope should be able to survive the extra wait time without breaking down again. Three of Hubble's gyroscopes, which keep it properly oriented, have failed, leaving it to operate on two. If necessary, NASA said, it could work with just one.

After 18 years, Hubble's batteries are operating at half-capacity.

"They are long past their design lifetime," Burch said. "The prudent thing to do is replace them. But we'll be fine for the next several months."



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Mission Accomplished: Leaving Hubble Better Than Ever (05.29.2009)

Take one space shuttle, seven highly trained astronauts, tons of equipment, and one legendary orbiting telescope and you have the 5.3 million-mile odyssey that was Hubble's final servicing mission.



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New Images from the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4


The Hubble Space Telescope: a conduit to the cosmos from which we spring.

On September 9, NASA released the first calibrated images from the Hubble Space Telescope after the Servicing Mission 4. This video shows the impressive improvements on the telescope's optics.

NASA Hubble telescope's latest spectacular space images explained


Hubble's newest images described and explained by Astronomer Bob O'Connell, Univ. of Virginia. From NASA & msnbc.com

Hubble's Universe Unfiltered: Interacting Galaxies - Cosmic Collisions Galore


Hubble celebrated its 18th anniversary by releasing a huge image gallery of interacting galaxies. Such galaxies pass close enough to each other that their mutual gravity can stretch and distort their shapes. Eventually, interacting galaxies merge together to form a single larger galaxy.

However, since these interactions can take billions of years, how do we study them? And how do we make sense of the variety of strange shapes seen in these Hubble images?

I've recently discovered an animation that was rendered using the measured redshift of all 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.

I've written a short script that leads you through a quick history of both deep field images and this video ends with a fly-through of the Ultra Deep Field.

Every galaxy in the image is in its proper distance as viewed from the telescope line of sight.

Hubblecast explores new Hubble Space Telescope images of star birth in the Orion Nebula, and animations illustrating how it happens. ESA Hubble, with the famous Dr. J.

Science@ESA: Following The Redshift (Part 2) - Hubble's Successor: The James Webb Space Telescope.

In this fourth episode of the Science@ESA vodcast series Rebecca Barnes will identify some of the key discoveries achieved with the famous Hubble Space Telescope, look at the concept of redshift, and meet a new telescope that will be used to uncover the early Universe.

Part 1 in a series of videos produced by the ESA for public distribution about the Hubble Space Telescope and much more.

This video is Copyright Free material with some restrictions.

Find out more at:
http://www.spacetelescope.org

2011 Hubble Space Telescope Calendar