NASA has good news for fans of the spectacular stellar images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been unable to send data back to earth since a computer malfunctioned several weeks ago: Engineers have successfully powered up the Hubble's backup data handling computer, which has slumbered in a dormant deep-freeze for the Hubble's 18 years of operation, and NASA officials say the telescope should be sending scientific data again by tomorrow. Engineers switched on the "Side B" backup system late Wednesday night.
The engineers then briefly switched back on several of Hubble’s instruments — the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer — to ensure that each had a working interface with the duplicate unit. The instruments were then commanded back into a dormant “safe mode," in which they were hibernating since the observatory went silent [Science ...
