The Hubble Space Telescope has watched planets, galaxies, stars and suns for the past 17 years. But as people looked for stars in this week?s mostly cloudy skies in vain, the telescope?s main camera ? 380 miles above the clouds ? was also blind.
During the weekend, NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will attempt to reroute power from a backup supply to the satellite?s main camera, restoring sight to the Hubble?s prized instrument.
“We are going to transition to side two of the electrics and that will be tested,” said Cheryl Gundy, spokeswoman for the Hubble Space Telescope Institute. “Then we will wait to see how it?s working.”
The Advanced Camera for Surveys began sending messages Monday morning that it had a malfunction with its power supply, and voltage levels exceeded the camera?s design limits. Soon after, transmission from the camera stopped.
Lead scientists from Johns Hopkins University, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute worked with the telescope?s clone in Greenbelt through the week, testing various scenarios to identify the problem. They were trying “to make it fail in different ways. Then they compare the data to that collected the moment the camera shut down,” said Paul Feldman, an astronomer with the Krieger School of the Arts and Sciences.
They also want to make sure the fix does not further harm the satellite by shorting out the backup system.
The camera was installed to the Hubble Telescope in 2002, and is capable of detecting lights from ultraviolet to the near infrared. Its contributions to the telescope have been tremendous during the past few years, astronomers said, and its restoration is currently one of NASA?s number one priorities.
President George Bush has made it one of his priorities as well, scrapping plans to guide the satellite into an ocean crash in 2008 and committing to continue to maintain and repair the eye in the sky.
A repair mission planned for later this year would extend the telescope?s life until 2013 by replacing batteries, gyroscopes and other maintenance tasks. However, astronomers are watching the planned shuttle launch as a bellwether, Gundy said.
If the shuttle?s insulating foam falls off during launch (before its crash, the space shuttle Columbia was damaged by foam debris) the fate of all future missions could be in jeopardy.
Tim Bojanowski contributed to this report.
