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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA will attempt on Wednesday to revive the $2 billion Hubble Space Telescope, which was idled two weeks ago by an equipment failure, officials said on Tuesday. The breakdown of a computer needed to relay science data to Earth prompted NASA to postpone until next year a long-awaited space shuttle mission to upgrade the orbital observatory. That flight, which had been slated for liftoff on Tuesday, was rescheduled for February. Engineers plan to send commands to the telescope early on Wednesday to switch over to a backup computer that has not even been turned on...

A serious equipment failure aboard the Hubble Space Telescope is preventing it from relaying data and images to scientists on Earth and will likely delay a shuttle mission to overhaul the observatory next month, NASA officials said Monday. The glitch occurred Saturday in one of two sides of a device known as a Control Unit/Science Data Formatter that is responsible for sending data from Hubble to scientists on Earth, said Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the shuttle Atlantis was being primed for an Oct. 14 launch. "The hardware failed,...

When astronauts overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope this summer, they will leave behind a vastly more powerful orbital observatory to scan the universe. Set to launch aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 7, the Hubble servicing mission will be the fifth - and final - sortie to upgrade the aging space telescope. "We're not only going up to Hubble to refurbish it, but also to expand its grasp tremendously," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, in a recent briefing. "We expect to make the very best discoveries of the entire two-decade plus Hubble program with the...

NASA (news - web sites)'s chief is urging his Hubble Space Telescope (news - web sites) team to press ahead with plans for a robotic repair mission to the aging observatory, saying, "Let's go save the Hubble." Administrator Sean O'Keefe says he will ask Congress for money to accomplish the job. He estimates it will take about $1 billion to $1.6 billion to develop and launch a robot to make the needed upgrades to keep the popular telescope running and to get it out of orbit once its work is through. In a meeting with more than 200 Hubble engineers...