The Hubble Space Telescope is back on track and ready to re-start observations after its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) proved to be working perfectly, NASA announced in Thursday. The first image captured two galaxies which together appeared to mark the number 10, and are situated more than 400 million light-years away from Earth.

Unfortunately for the Hubble mission, not everything goes as planned, as NASA announced the delay of the February 2009 servicing mission. According to the agency, they will not be able to meet the necessary requirements for the February launch. The announcement was made after NASA specialists completed an assessment on how long it would take to a have a second data handling unit for the telescope ready.

“The February date was an initial estimate, assuming minimal hardware preparations and test durations that are no longer viewed as realistic,” said NASA’s Astrophysics Division Director Jon Morse at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington. “We’ve communicated our assessment to the Space Shuttle Program so it can adjust near-term plans. We will work closely with the Shuttle Program to develop details for a new launch opportunity,” he added.

On September 27, a failure that occurred in the Side A Science Data Formatter in the Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SIC&DH) forced the interruption of science observations from Hubble. Two weeks later, the engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center managed to reconfigure six components of the Hubble Data Management System and five components of the Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SCI&DH).

The problem with Hubble now is that it will have to continue future observations without relying on a backup system, as before. NASA is currently searching for alternatives to this, since leaving Hubble without a backup system is not an option.

Consequently NASA is forced to put in place a backup system, a work that requires many steps and a lot of effort to complete. According to Hubble Program Manager Preston Burch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the flight certification peer review meeting confirmed that they have a good plan in place.

NASA said the Hubble flight spare has been at Goddard since it was originally delivered in 1991, and that it is currently undergoing testing and examination to identify and correct any problems. This work should end by mid-December, and will be followed by environmental assessments (electro-magnetic interference checks, vibration tests, thermal vacuum chamber assessment), which are expected to end by March 2009.

Considering the testing won’t end until late spring probably, the final Hubble servicing mission will need to wait quite a while before getting the green light. However, NASA is confident that its specialists will know how to deal with the equipment they have in place. It’s especially important to note that the original unit on Hubble that needs replacement now was fully functional for the past 18 years, since Hubble’s launch.

The Hubble mission started back in 1990, when the shuttle Discovery launched and released the telescope into the orbit 304 nautical miles above the Earth. Since then, it has circled around Earth over 97,000 times, and has provided numerous answers in ways that would have been impossible from Earth observations.