NASA set for attempt to fix Hubble's trouble

Reportedly, the onboard computer halted on June 13 and engineers have been troubleshooting the problem since then.

The trouble with the telescope led the scientific instruments for being put in safe mode - where all non-essential systems are shut down.

It is being termed as the worst glitch in years to hit the venerated observatory.

Hubble is the world's most powerful space telescope and orbits 353 miles above the Earth. The space telescope has captured images of the births and deaths of stars, discovered new moons around Pluto, and tracked two interstellar objects as they zipped through our solar system.

The telescope's payload computer is a 1980s machine that controls and monitors all of the spacecraft's science instruments.

Its observations have allowed astronomers to calculate the age and expansion of the universe and to peer at galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang.

Ground controllers will begin switching over to back-up hardware today (July 15), in an effort to get one of the most important scientific tools in history up and running again.

Now, the possible origin of the malfunction has been traced to a control unit that supplies electricity to the failed computer.

Earlier on June 30, NASA announced it had figured out that the source of the payload computer problem wasn't the computer at all — it came from other hardware in Hubble's Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit, where the computer resides.

Engineers think the issue could originate in a glitchy power regulator, or in a module that helps send commands to the telescope's science instruments and prepare data from those instruments to beam back to Earth.

In 2008, after a computer crash took the telescope offline for two weeks, engineers switched over to redundant hardware.