The Hubble Telescope is still under serious investigation, after the specialists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have
encountered yet another glitch in the system. On Thursday afternoon, just hours before the end of the reconfiguring mission, when the telescope should have been ready to send the first test images back to Earth, the engineers were unable to reboot the system.

The problems started at the end of last month, and in an unexpected decision from NASA, the servicing mission that was supposed to take off by mid-October had to be postponed until at least February next year, due to some difficulties to Hubble’s 18-year-old computer.

On Wednesday, NASA began by reconfiguring the components of the Hubble Data Management System and five components in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SIC&DH) to their redundant B sides. By Thursday noon, the science instruments were back in their normal operating modes, however at 1:40 a.m. an anomaly to the Advanced Camera for Surveys occurred, which foiled NASA plans to restart Hubble once more.

According to initial investigations, the problem resided in a low voltage power supply to the ACS Solar Blind Channel, which caused the ACS to be suspended. Four hours later, Hubble lost the “keep alive signal” from the NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer in the SIC&DH, and responded by safing the NSSC and the science instruments, NASA explained.

Although it still remains uncertain whether the last two events are related in any way, NASA says an investigation is under way,
and we should expect Hubble Telescope to become fully operational by late next week. The problem with Hubble now is that it will have to continue future observation 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.

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.

Since its launch it has taken more than 750,000 photos of distant never before seen places and has offered answers to many questions related to our surroundings.

A year ago, the Hubble telescope's most far-seeing camera shut down due to a possible power failure and other problems, prompting NASA engineers to put the entire telescope on temporary standby. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was installed in 2002 in a special shuttle mission to replace the old space camera - in orbit since 1990 - and was hailed as the gateway to some of humankind's most spectacular views of the universe.

Theoretically, the James Webb observatory will replace Hubble in 2013 the earliest. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was first conceived in 1946 by astronomer Lyman Spitzer. Its construction began in 1979.