spacetoday.net: Hubble camera fails

Posted: Tue, Jan 30, 2007, 7:12 AM ET (1212 GMT)
Hubble Space Telescope (NASA)

A key instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope shut down over the weekend and is likely all but lost for good, NASA officials said Monday. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) shut down Saturday morning when its backup power supply failed, temporarily putting the entire spacecraft into a protective safe mode. While the spacecraft itself has been recovered and will resume scientific observations this week, the ACS has failed permanently, other than one channel of the instrument used for a small fraction of the instrument's observations. The ACS was Hubble's most popular instrument because of its ability to peer deep into the universe. The instrument, which failed just shy of its designed five-year lifetime, had shut down twice in the last year because of power supply problems. Although a final Hubble servicing mission is scheduled for next year, there is no room in the current mission plan to perform any repairs to the ACS.