NASA's space agency managers announced that they had successfully restarted the broken Hubble Space Telescope, but acknowledged that they won't be ready to send a repair team to the 18-year-old instrument until May at the earliest.After reactivating two cameras on Hubble, scientists beamed its first pictures to Earth since a glitch idled the telescope several weeks ago.
They released an image of a pair of interacting galaxies that appeared to form the number 10 -- a picture that inspired NASA officials to declare the telescope had scored a "perfect 10" as it got back to work.
The new pictures were testimony to their success. The images were made with the scope's Wide-Field Planetary Camera and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA said it hoped to have the other instruments operating in the next few days.
There was no certainty the switch to Side B would work. That unit had sat idle in space for 18 years while its brother did all the work. But now that it's operating, said Hubble manager Preston Burch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., he feels "very confident" it will continue to work in the coming weeks.
NASA also announced Thursday that a repair mission to Hubble would be delayed once again. Before the data-handling unit broke, a team was to depart for the telescope Oct. 14 to replace faulty gyroscopes and worn batteries. NASA said the mission would be delayed until at least February while engineers took a new data-handling unit out of storage and prepared it for launch.
That unit, it turned out, wasn't operable. It had been partly disassembled. When it was put back together, it "didn't handle the commands properly," Burch said during a news briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington.
The repair mission, whenever it happens, will be the last for Hubble. NASA had not even planned to make this one but was forced into it by Congress after a public outcry in support of the telescope.
