Hubble Telescope's Main Camera Shuts Down

The Hubble Space Telescope's main camera — the ACS (advanced camera for surveys) — has stopped working. It went into safe mode early Saturday morning, and engineers for the space telescope have little hope it can be fixed.

The ACS was installed in 2002 and increased the discovery capability of the telescope by a factor of 10. It consists of three electronic cameras, filters and dispersers that can detect light from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared end of the spectrum and had become the primary instrument of the telescope. The ACS was valuable to astronomers because it could take deep imaging surveys of clusters of galaxies, allowing scientists to study these environments. Hubble still has other cameras which look at different spectrums that are still operating.

NASA has scheduled a shuttle mission to fly to Hubble in September 2008, but that mission is so full already that Preston Burch, Hubble associate director at the Goddard Space Flight Center, says he doesn't believe a spacewalk to fix the camera is possible.

NASA has been reluctant to send missions to the Hubble because it is in a different orbit than the ISS, which can be a safe haven should the shuttle sustain damage on liftoff comparable to that which felled the Columbia. However, they have agreed that to send the shuttle to Hubble in 2008 because of the invaluable science that the Hubble provides and that the 2008 mission can extend the life of the telescope and extend its capabilities until such time that a suitable shuttle replacement or Hubble replacement comes into service.

The Hubble currently has other instruments that are still operative, though the 2008 mission's most critical phase is the replacement of the gyroscopes that keep the telescope aligned with the targets. The Hubble is currently operating from the backup systems. If those fail, the entire system goes into a safe mode that cannot conduct science.