A pair of unrelated anomalies on Thursday afternoon forced engineers to stop trying to remotely revive the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, NASA officials announced today.
Dozens of engineers had been working around the clock since Wednesday to switch to a backup system after the primary data formatter failed on September 27, rendering Hubble unable to transmit science information to Earth.
The process appeared to be going smoothly at first—Hubble was successfully reconfigured and its instruments were slowly waking up from a "safe mode" shutdown.
But yesterday afternoon a pair of seemingly unrelated issues cropped up during routine tests, sending the repair team scrambling to figure out what went wrong.
"We're in the early stage of going through a mountain of data that has been downloaded over the past 24 hours," Art Whipple, lead mission systems engineer for Hubble, said during a press conference Friday afternoon.
"We think the soonest that we would be back doing full science would be sometime late next week. There's a lot of analysis to be done."
John Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters, said the team is undaunted.
"We remain optimistic at this time for recovering full science operations."
Double Whammy
The first problem arose at just past 1:30 p.m. eastern time on Thursday.
After successful restarts of three onboard cameras, one of them—the Advanced Camera for Surveys—abruptly shut down when it detected low voltage in one of its components.
Engineers met to discuss the problem at 5 p.m. on Thursday. Not quite 15 minutes later, during the meeting, another problem emerged.
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