Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Hubble’s eyes are still closed. The good news is that its brains are back on.

Today, telescope operators rebooted the computer that controls the nearly all of the science instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. This system, and one other one that controls data formatting, went into safe mode on 16 October after an electrical short or open circuit jolted the systems, says Art Whipple, a telescope manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There is a chance that similar shorts could happen in the future, he told reporters during a 23 October teleconference.

As for plans for rebooting Hubble’s eyes, telescope operators hope to release a new image by early Saturday morning. Whipple wasn’t sure what the image would be of, but the team plans to snap and release it to celebrate if the telescope successfully reboots one of its three cameras. Getting that image rests, of course, on whether the telescope suffers any more hiccups before then.

Image: Two aligned spiral galaxies, snapped before Hubble lost its vision