Article Posted on : - Oct 16, 2008

The four shuttle carrier systems that will carry all of Hubble's new hardware into orbit. NASA photo

NEW YORK (BNS): NASA has announced that the Hubble Space Telescope team has completed their remote efforts to switch hardware from a failed system to a standby one. In their first response after the process was over, NASA said they have received telemetry that “verified they had good data,” and that "everything at this point looks good.”

The Hubble Telescope has not been sending data back to Earth since late last month, when the science data formatter, which collects information from all instruments and package them for transmission back to Earth, broke down. The technical problem forced NASA to also postpone its repair mission to the telescope, which is now 18 years old.

“We won’t know if we’ve been completely successful until around midnight Wednesday when we demonstrate that the SIC&DH Side B is talking to the instruments and able to pass data to the ground,” said the team’s Operations Deputy Project Manager Keith Kalinowski at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Meanwhile, Space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to roll back from Launch Pad 39A to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday. The roll back is taking place because of the delay in the launch of Shuttle Atlantis owing to repair of the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA said that the fully assembled shuttle Atlantis, consisting of the orbiter, external tank and twin solid rocket boosters, is mounted on a Mobile Launcher Platform and will be delivered to the Vehicle Assembly Building atop a crawler transporter. “The crawler will travel slower than 1 mph during the 3.4-mile journey, which is expected to take approximately six hours,” said NASA.