14 DAY TRIAL // The Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed in 2002 during Hubble's fourth shuttle servicing mission and which doubled Hubble's existing field of view, has now stopped working. The camera is very important also because it is capable of recording information more quickly than the telescope's other optical camera, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.
"This is our most popular instrument at the moment, so it would be very, very annoying if we couldn't recover it. But there's not a shred of evidence for that," said Bruce Margon, at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, US, which manages Hubble's observations. "We're 99% convinced everything will be perfect."
Scientists believe the problem was probably caused by cosmic rays - a charged particle from space damaged the camera's power supply. "Most likely, some five-cent resistor or capacitor that's supposed to last for 20 years by bad luck only lasted for six," Margon explained for New Scientist.
Such a problem should be fixed easily and he is optimistic that things will return to normal in a short while. The camera includes a duplicate low-voltage power supply for just such failures. "If we're correct, we'll just turn on the backup system and it's good as new," he said.
There is a small chance that camera's memory board might have been hit. "Every now and then, microprocessors in space get hit by a cosmic ray and get confused," Margon said, mentioning that software problems are even more easily repaired than hardware problems. In this case mission managers would simply reboot the camera's software.
NASA estimates that the problem should be fixed in a matter of weeks. In the unlikely situation that the camera is permanently lost Hubble's scientific capabilities would suffer a serious blow - at least until NASA would send another shuttle service to the space telescope. NASA plans such a shuttle mission in any case because they want to upgrade the telescope with a new camera called Wide Field Camera 3.
Photo: the Advanced Camera for Surveys before it was sent to Hubble. Credit: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.