The primary instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope shut down this week, an unwelcome reminder that the observatory’s future is tightly tied to NASA’s upcoming space shuttle launch. Project managers expect the telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to be out of commission at least through the end of the month, but have high hopes it eventually will be recovered. ‘I think we’ve identified where the problem area is,’ Edward Ruitberg, the program’s deputy manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in an interview. advertisement line If engineers’ initial troubleshooting efforts are correct, the problem should be resolved by switching to a backup electronics unit. A circuit on the primary unit is believed to have failed. The backup unit was extensively tested before Hubble was put into orbit in 1990 but has not been powered on since. ‘We fully expect that it will be working,’ Ruitberg said. While Hubble’s flight control team works to revive the camera, other engineers have been busy for months devising ways to eke out more power from the observatory’s batteries and develop methods for precision pointing using just one gyroscope, rather than three, as was originally […]