This month has not been one of the best for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, since an electrical malfunction managed to put the Hubble on the bench from September 27 until recently. This occurred because an instrument used to send information back to Earth, called the data formatter, stopped working. The malfunction was followed by two other glitches in the spacecraft’s system, when both the backup formatter and the backup computer reset not long after they had been turned on.

Currently, engineers have been able to fix the problems and get the Hubble back in business. Starting October 23rd, the backup system was turned back on and now is working just fine, even though this is the first time in eighteen years the computer has been put to use.

A few days later, Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 took an image of a pair of galaxies about 450 million light-years far-off in the Cetus constellation, the snap having been deemed by the engineers as being the same quality as the ones that had been taken before the electrical malfunction.

The smoke-ring galaxies known as Arp 147 seem to have collided in the cosmic past, one having passed through another, which gave rise to a ring of blue stars at the center of the galaxy that had the other pass through it.
A Hubble servicing mission, the forth and the last one, had been planned for this October 14, but the data formatter’s malfunction rendered NASA to postpone the launch until next year, possibly until spring. Engineers stated that the spare part needed to replace the faulty data handler would probably be ready in May 2009.

The repair mission had been set to replace three damaged gyroscopes and worn-out batteries, which have been working at half-capacity lately, since they have exceeded their design lifetime.

Named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who demonstrated the existence of other galaxies besides the Milky Way, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was blast off into the orbit in 1990. Its Ultra Deep Field image is the most detailed visible-light image of the universe's distant objects that has been developed so far, while the telescope is the only one that has been designed to be serviced in space by engineers.

The first servicing mission took place in December 1993, when a problem with Hubble’s main mirror was fixed. The following repair flights to the telescope, SM 1, SM 3A and SM 3B were aimed at replacing various instruments with technologically enhanced ones.
The Hubble is scheduled to remain functional until 2013, when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to be launched into orbit to replace it. The JWST will only observe the outer-space in infrared.