A shuttle mission to service the Hubble telescope will be delayed because a new malfunction has arisen on the orbiting observatory.
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The US space agency, Nasa, had planned to launch a mission to repair and upgrade the telescope on 14 October.
Now, it says the mission will be held on the ground while a fix is considered and replacement components are tested.
Before Monday's development, Nasa astronauts had been rehearsing spacewalks to carry out a series of known repair and upgrade tasks. The payload of tools and spares they needed for those jobs has already been loaded on to space shuttle Atlantis.
The orbiter itself has been rolled out to the launch pad.
If new tasks and components are added to the mission profile, the crew would need extra training to deal them.
The upcoming mission to Hubble is the fifth and final flight designed to keep the great observatory serviceable.
Its batteries and gyroscopes, which are used to point the telescope, are degrading and they now need to be replaced.
The shuttle crew is also tasked with installing two new instruments: the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The new instruments will improve significantly Hubble's ability to probe distant, faint objects in the early Universe.
The Atlantis astronauts must also repair two instruments that have failed in recent years - the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS).
If the work is carried out successfully, it should allow Hubble to keep operating into the next decade.
(BBC)
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