NASA鈥檚 Hubble Space Telescope has once again closed its amazing eye. This time, though, it may never open fully again.
On 27 January, an electrical short in the electronics of Hubble鈥檚 main camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, prompted it to go into protective 鈥渟afe鈥� mode. 鈥淥bviously, we鈥檙e very disappointed by this latest event because of the popularity of ACS with astronomers,鈥� says Preston Burch of NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The ACS was operating on backup power after its primary power had problems in June 2006. Now that the backup has failed, NASA will switch the ACS back to partial primary power, but the camera may never regain full use of two of its three main camera-like channels 鈥� the wide-field channel (WFC) and the high-resolution channel. The electronics that powers these channels is crippled. 鈥淲e are not optimistic at all that those will be restored,鈥� says Hubble鈥檚 project scientist, David Leckrone. The WFC is best known for its Ultra Deep Field survey of galaxies going back to 700 million years after the big bang, our deepest look yet into the history of the universe.
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NASA is unlikely to fix or replace the ACS on a final space shuttle mission to Hubble in September 2008, as the crew is already slated to install new batteries and gyroscopes, replace a fine guidance sensor and repair a spectrograph. They will also install two new instruments 鈥� the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Wide Field Camera 3.
