One month ago, on September 27, the Hubble Space Telescope was rendered useless by an electrical malfunction that caused the spacecraft’s data formatter, which is used to send information to Earth, to stop working.

Two weeks later, NASA engineers switched Hubble’s computers to a backup formatter, but unfortunately to no avail, since the latter reset only a few hours after in had been turned on. To top that off, a backup computer the engineers used to manage cameras and other several instruments also reset, lead systems engineer for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, having stated at that time that an electrical short or open circuit had given rise to the issue.

Nevertheless, on October 23, the backup system was turned back on.

The Telescope's problems appear to have been solved recently, since astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore released an image showing a pair of smoke-rings galaxies known as Arp 147, which was captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

The image of the galaxies, which are located in the constellation of Cetus, were taken on October 27 and 28.

Hubble Space Telescope was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1990, but because the main mirror had been ground incorrectly, it only became fully functional three years later, in 1993.

The fourth servicing mission (SM4) for the spacecraft, which will also be the last one, had initially been scheduled for October 14, 2008. Still, due to this recent electrical malfunction, NASA decided to postpone the SM4 until 2009.

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.

The telescope’s substantial help with the astronomy’s progress over the last 19 years is widely recognized. According to the scientists, there are still many projects that will demand its assistance. In almost two decades of activity, the Hubble Telescope took over 750,000 photos of distant never before seen places and has offered answers to many questions related to our surroundings.