Equipment Failures

Couldn't get to your voice mail at home or work Wednesday or Thursday -- or leave a message on some phones? Neither could any other California customers with voice mail on their Verizon Communications Inc. land lines. A database error in a central server in Ontario froze the software for all 740,000 land-line customers subscribing to Verizon's voice mail early Wednesday, and the state's second-largest telephone company couldn't say late Thursday when the problem would be fixed.

The company behind the BlackBerry smart phones said a three-hour e-mail outage Monday was caused by an upgrade designed to increase capacity. Research in Motion Ltd. said Tuesday that the upgrade was part of "routine and ongoing efforts," and that similar upgrades in the past had caused no problems. The outage, which started about 12:30 p.m. PST, annoyed subscribers who are used to checking and writing e-mail whenever they're in cellular coverage and able to make voice calls.

Regulators are launching a special inspection at Southern California Edison's San Onofre nuclear plant to make sure the utility fixed electrical problems with crucial backup power systems, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday. The visit next week by a three-person team marks the third special inspection in the last 12 months for the coastal facility near San Clemente.

An instrument that stores and transmits science data back to Earth has broken down on the Hubble Space Telescope, forcing NASA on Monday to postpone a long-scheduled repair mission to the ailing, 18-year-old telescope. The 136-pound control unit and science data formatter, which separates data from the telescope's five major science instruments into packets for transmission to scientists on Earth, broke down Saturday night, according to NASA scientists.

Spacewalking astronauts completed almost all of the greasy repairs on a gummed-up joint at the International Space Station on Saturday, leaving just a few chores for another day. As spacewalk No. 3 was getting underway 225 miles up, a new recycling system for converting urine and other wastewater into drinking water broke down again. It was the third day in a row that the processor inexplicably shut down, and it appeared to be the same kind of sluggish motor trouble seen before.

Water officials said Tuesday that pumps designed to push water to the upper reaches of a hillside Yorba Linda neighborhood failed during a Nov. 15 firestorm, possibly explaining why firefighters were forced to abandon the area and let homes burn after fire hydrants went dry. The disclosure came four days after Orange County fire officials blamed the loss of as many as five homes in the neighborhood on lack of water from fire hydrants.

New telecommunications equipment designed to deliver information to controllers in a San Diego facility that handles air traffic across Southern California malfunctioned early Wednesday, delaying 14 flights out of Ontario International Airport. The nearly two-hour outage started at the Terminal Radar Approach Control Center about 5:30 a.m.

The newest and most heavily used camera on the Hubble Space Telescope shut down over the weekend and appears to be permanently damaged, NASA said Monday. Though other cameras on Hubble remain operative, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is used to peer back to the earliest and most remote galaxies in the universe, appears to be irreparable and will have to be replaced on the next Hubble servicing mission in September 2008.

A system that gauges visibility on runways at Los Angeles International Airport during heavy fog failed early Wednesday, forcing air traffic controllers to divert about six flights to other airports. A broken heating coil in a light sensor caused the equipment, which was tested three days ago, to malfunction, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages the nation's air traffic control network. The system went down about 4 a.m.

NASA is investigating problems with two instruments aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the agency announced this week. In November, scientists operating the probe's high-resolution camera noticed an increase in image "noise," such as bad pixels. A problem also developed in an instrument that maps temperature, ice clouds and dust in the atmosphere. Scientists discovered the instrument had a skewed field of view.