Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

If all goes well, Hubble could be back to its old tricks by the end of the week.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s science mission has been largely suspended since 27 September, when the earth-orbiting observatory suffered a hardware failure with its science-data computer. But NASA officials announced Tuesday that a team of engineers is ready to begin reconfiguring the damaged equipment.

By Friday morning engineers and astronomers alike will know whether Hubble will be able to continue operating as the agency prepares a servicing mission now scheduled for 2009, said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Reconfiguring the telescope’s computer processing system is complex and requires that certain elements of the telescope hardware be rebooted after more than 18 years of dormancy. There’s a possibility that some of the equipment won’t boot up, Whipple said, but the record for bringing dormant components on line is nearly perfect. That gives the team “very good confidence that this will work,” he said.

If it fails, Hubble will likely remain in a safe mode until the servicing crew can replace the damaged hardware, which processes information from the telescope’s scientific instruments and passes it on to Earth. Astronauts had planned to perform the last servicing mission on the telescope in October, but the hardware failure caused NASA to push the mission back.

Once the reboot of the current system is complete later this week, Hubble engineers will begin to test the spare system and bring it “up to speed”. By November, the engineers should know if the spare can endure a shaky ride into space and then be successfully integrated into Hubble’s circuitry, Whipple said.

Of course, the additional testing of the system and the shifting of the launch come at a price. NASA officials peg the cost at $10 million per month.