Hubble telescope’s main camera not working

BALTIMORE – The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its stunning pictures of the universe, has stopped working.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys, a third-generation instrument installed by a space shuttle crew in 2002, went off line Monday, and engineers are still trying to figure out what happened and how to repair it.

Engineers are hopeful the problem can be fixed, said Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman at Goddard Space Flight Center.

A bad transistor could be causing the trouble, Campion said. If so, a backup could be used. Another suspicion is that some of the camera’s memory was disturbed by a cosmic event. That could be fixed by reloading the memory.