Hubble Space Telescope

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.

NASA engineers will begin trying today to bring the out-of-commission Hubble Space Telescope back online by switching to a backup system on a piece of equipment that relays data from the telescope to Earth. The science data formatter, which collects information from the various instruments aboard the telescope and packages it for delivery, broke down late last month.

The ailing Hubble Space Telescope could be snapping pictures of the heavens again as early as Saturday after engineers fixed one of the problems that has largely shut down the instrument for the last three weeks. "We spent the last week reviewing," said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Systems Management Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Now we're ready to resume recovery."

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. After reactivating two cameras on Hubble, scientists beamed its first pictures to Earth since a glitch idled the telescope several weeks ago.

Reaching a milestone in the search for Earth-like planets in the universe, two teams of astronomers say they have parted the curtains of space to take the first pictures of planets beyond our solar system. The first team, led by UC Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. "It's almost science fiction," said Berkeley astronomer Eugene Chiang.

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.

No loser here: "The Biggest Loser," which only began its fourth season two weeks ago, already has been renewed for a fifth engagement, NBC said Monday. Space film: IMAX Corp., Warner Bros. Pictures and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are teaming to produce an IMAX 3D film about the Hubble Space Telescope, for release in 2010.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first image of a cosmic object that has been known but never before seen: a small, faint companion of the North Star, also known as Polaris. Though the image released Monday may not seem spectacular -- it's a little blurry blob -- it helped scientists figure out the North Star's mass: about four times the mass of our sun.

The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its stunning pictures of the universe, has stopped operating, engineers who work on the camera said. The Advanced Camera for Surveys, a third-generation instrument installed by a space shuttle crew in 2002, went off-line Monday, and engineers are still trying to figure out what happened and how to repair it.

NASA switched to backup power for the main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope on Friday and expected to know soon whether the change had revived the disabled device. The switch, lasting several hours, will probably clear up the problem, but it is possible the camera still won't work, said Ed Ruitberg, deputy associate director of the Astrophysics Division at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.