This story was updated at 8:34 p.m. EDT.
The fallout
from a major glitch with the Hubble Space Telescope has again delayed NASA's
plans to send a space shuttle crew to overhaul the orbital observatory for the
final time, with launch now set for no earlier than May 2009 due to problems
with a spare part, the agency said late Thursday.
NASA was hoping to launch seven
astronauts to Hubble aboard the shuttle Atlantis on Oct. 14, but delayed the
mission to February after a serious hardware failure prevented the space
telescope from relaying the bulk of its images and data to Earth late last
month.
But now the
mission will fly no earlier than sometime next May after problems cropped up with
a spare data handling component designed to restore Hubble to full strength.
"Our plan
is to have it ready to ship to [Kennedy Space Center] in the April-ish timeframe
so that it would support a May-ish type launch," Hubble program manager Preston
Burch of NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told reporters in a
teleconference.
Top NASA
officials said late Thursday that the Hubble delay will not impact plans to
launch the next two shuttle missions to the International Space Station. They
cleared the shuttle Endeavour for its planned Nov. 14 launch on a space station supply,
with the shuttle Discovery slated to launch to the orbiting lab in March 2009.
"There're
really no constraints," said Bill Gersternmaier, NASA's space operations chief,
in a separate mission briefing. "We're pretty stable, so we can put Hubble in
whenever it makes sense to put Hubble in."
Every month
Atlantis' Hubble servicing mission is delayed adds an extra $10 million in
operating costs, NASA officials have said. Commanded
by veteran spaceflyer Scott Altman, Atlantis' STS-125 Hubble servicing crew plans
to fly an 11-day mission and stage five spacewalks to overhaul the space
telescope for the fifth and final time.
Hubble glitch history
A vital
data relay channel, Side A of Hubble's Science Instrument Control and Data
Handling system, failed
on Sept. 27, prompting the shuttle mission delay. The failure also sparked
a weeks-long effort by engineers to switch to the backup channel, Side B, for
the first time since Hubble launched in April 1990.
After
a few hiccups, that troubleshooting effort culminated in the release
earlier today of Hubble's first new image since the glitch: a portrait of an odd
pair of galaxies called Arp 147.
"I'm
very confident that the Side B system is going to continue to operate as it has
been over the last several days," Burch said. "Right now, the unit appears to
be very stable."
The
activation of Side B allows Hubble to resume beaming home its iconic views of
the universe, but also leaves the space telescope without another backup if it
too should fail.
NASA
delayed the launch of Atlantis toward Hubble to allow engineers more time to
test a spare data handling system unit on Earth at the Goddard center. But by
coincidence, the Side A channel of that device has also experienced glitches.
Efforts to power it up yielded intermittent results.
"What we
suspect is, there's a workmanship or a parts problem on that unit that's
causing this glitch," Burch said. "We do need to isolate the fault that's
causing this particular issue."
Engineers
are tracing the history of the decades-old spare part, which had been partially
disassembled over the years and is now being patched back together. It would
take at least a full year to build a completely new unit from scratch, mission
managers said.
"We don't
want to take any chances on bringing a box up there that isn't going to be 100
percent working to the absolute best that it can," Burch said. "We don't want
to leave any stones unturned on the way to the launch pad."
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