By Ron Cowen
NASA’s premiere orbiting observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, abruptly stopped transmitting data September 27.
The problem comes just two weeks before the planned launch of a mission to service and upgrade the 18-year-old observatory. Efforts to troubleshoot the recent problem will delay that mission, originally scheduled to fly October 14, until at least next February, NASA scientists announced during a telephone briefing on September 29.
Hubble fell silent because of an unknown failure inside a science data formatting unit, which packages and labels data recorded by the observatory’s five science instruments, said Preston Burch, Hubble manager at NASA’s GoddardSpaceFlightCenter in Greenbelt, Md.