A very short while before October 14, when the scheduled upgrade mission for the aging Hubble Space Telescope was due to launch, a critical computer system called the Control Unit/Science Data Formatter which interprets raw data from Hubble instruments and transmits them back to Earth failed. This has delayed the shuttle upgrade mission for several months.

NASA operators however, are almost thankful that it happened; at least that it did so now. Had the failure occurred, say two weeks after the upgrade, they would have been in deep trouble. Putting one Space Shuttle flight into space costs NASA about $1.3 billion, but that’s not the main problem; the Shuttle Program is obsolete and being phased out, so no more parts have been in production for a few years, and NASA only has enough for a set number of flights, with very few to spare. NASA is unsure if they could have gotten an additional spaceflight for maintenance to the Hubble had this error been discovered too late.

The broken formatter came with a redundant backup system, Side B, which controllers are trying to bring online and re-rout the space telescope’s instruments to. The problem is that the backup has not been put to the test since 18 years ago when the Hubble was launched, simply because there was never any need to. Meanwhile it has been exposed to the same amount of cosmic radiation as its failed counterpart, so there is a possibility that the backup may not start.

Nevertheless scientists are attempting to do so and will report if they’ve had success by the end of the week. Worst case scenario, the backup has failed too and the Hubble will be out of order for months until they come up and install the replacement, but it could have been much worse had the crash happened later. It would likely have meant the end of Hubble. The currently planned upgrade is the last one anyway, next time the Hubble breaks down it will be allowed to drift out of orbit and burn in Earth’s atmosphere.

The mission as defined and planned for October 14 was intended to repair several minor electronic failures in the telescope, and install some new equipment such as a wide-field camera and an ultraviolet spectrograph. It’s unknown if there will be time and resources to accomplish this as well as to repair the new malfunction but scientists say they will nevertheless try.

If successful, the upgrade will increase the image quality and overall performance of the Hubble Space Telescope beyond anything Terra’s eye in/on the sky has achieved so far. The telescope, named for astronomer Edwin Hubble has been around, despite similar technical problems, since 1980, and it has provided scientists with a much clearer and deeper view of our Universe than anything that could be achieved by ground based telescopes, whose depth of field is limited by Earth’s atmosphere.