By Ron Cowen
NASA engineers late on October 15 successfully rebooted the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been silent since September 27, when a unit that formats data so it can be relayed to Earth suddenly failed.
Engineers were able to switch Hubble from the failed unit to a duplicate device, officially known as the science instrument control and data handling system, which is still operating on the 18-year-old spacecraft.
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.