Hubble Servicing Mission Off Indefinitely

NASA's fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission is being delayed indefinitely because a spare instrument control and data handling system won't be ready for a February launch opportunity, officials said today.

Hubble project managers think the critical spare system should be able to be tested and certified for flight during an opportunity in May. But NASA space operations officials likely will wait to see how the testing program progresses before deciding where to shoehorn the mission into a tight schedule to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

NASA space operations officials are expected to outline schedule opportunities during a news briefing that will be webcast live in The Flame Trench at 6:30 p.m. Click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of this page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage.

Hubble Project Manager Preston Burch said NASA aims to have the spare system ready to deliver to Kennedy Space Center in April. Engineers ran into some trouble during early testing of the 18-year-old assembly of electronics units, but Burch said engineers expect to be able to qualify the unit for flight.

However, Jon Morse, the director of NASA's astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters, acknowledged that the agency might have to consider canceling the mission if the spare system cannot be launched.

Hubble now is operating on a back-up Science Instrument Control and Data Handling Unit, and if it were to fail, then the observatory would automatically shut down science observations and the telescope's useful life would be over.

The flagship observatory resumed science observations earlier this week and Hubble Program Manager Preston Burch said that he is confident the telescope will continue to operate until STS-125 astronaut crew can be launched.

The Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2, which is the workhorse instrument that has delivered most of Hubble's iconic images, now is back-up and operating and so is the one of three cameras on the Advanced Camera for Surveys also is working again.

NASA in mid-November will attempt to restart a near-infrared camera and multi-object spectrometer.

NASA had planned to launch Atlantis and seven astronauts on the agency's last Hubble servicing mission on Oct. 14. The telescope's prime instrument control and science data formatter failed Sept. 27, and NASA decided to delay the launch until a spare could be readied for flight.