SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Hubble Back to Work This Weekend, NASA Says

from National Geographic News

The Hubble Space Telescope could resume scientific observations as early as this weekend, NASA officials said Thursday.

The 18-year-old spacecraft has not gathered data since September 27, when its data formatter, which sends information back to Earth, stopped working.

Last week NASA engineers put several key Hubble computers and all of its scientific instruments into safe mode so the team could switch to a backup formatter. Although the data formatter turned on, it mysteriously reset after a matter of hours, as did a backup computer used to manage Hubble's suite of cameras and other instruments.