BALTIMORE, April 30 (UPI) -- Science operations using the Hubble Space Telescope were temporarily suspended after an equipment failure left it with only one spare gyroscope, officials said Wednesday.
The telescope lost the second of six critical gyroscopes, three of which are required to properly position and hold the observatory on target, said Ray Villard, with the Space Science Telescope Institute.
Observations were scheduled to resume late Wednesday after ground control teams radioed commands to the telescope to activate a backup gyroscope. The telescope went into an automated safe-mode on Tuesday when one of the three gyroscopes it was using failed. The device had troubled engineers previously, but they had been able to reactivate it, said Villard.
Wednesday, after a day of trouble-shooting, the gyroscope was officially taken out of service, said Villard.
NASA will have to nurse along the telescope on its remaining four gyroscopes for the foreseeable future, as shuttle-servicing missions to the observatory are on hold in the wake of the Columbia disaster.
Before the Feb. 1 accident, NASA had planned to dispatch a shuttle crew on a fifth and final house call to Hubble in November 2004. The agency, however, grounded its fleet after the fatal accident that claimed the lives of seven astronauts.
Some proposals being discussed for return-to-flight operations would dedicate the remaining three ships exclusively to space station construction and re-supply, omitting the Hubble servicing call and a proposed mission to return the observatory back to Earth.
"We're proceeding and planning for that servicing mission," said Villard. "There has been no change in plans that we know of."
During the 2004 mission, NASA planned to install two new science instruments and replace failed systems, such as the gyroscopes.
(Reported by Irene Brown, UPI Science News, at Cape Canaveral, Fla.)
