Holy cow, how did I miss this? On Saturday, engineers sent commands to the Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 (Hubble's main camera since the Advanced Camera for Surveys suffered a short a while back) to wake it up:
Additional commanding allowed engineers on the ground to assess the instrument's state of health and verify the contents of the camera's microprocessor memory. All systems are poised to begin acquiring science data later today. The first observations made will be for data calibration purposes. The team at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Hubble science, expects to release an image late next week.
I'm glad I spotted this on Emily's blog. Sadly, there's no RSS feed on that page from NASA (sigh). But I'll try to stay on top of this; I imagine NASA will send out a press notice when the new images are released. We're not all the way home yet -- the Shuttle still needs to get up there and place out a lot of equipment, including installing a backup for the backup that's now being used to control the cameras. Still... Yay! Congrats to the engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA!
