I have to hand it to the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They’ve gone and done it again—bringing a critical part of the system back online after a wild few days of diagnosis. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (one of the telescope’s main “eyes” on the sky) suffered a power supply problem. They took it offline to avoid damage, did some quick tests, and managed to bring it all back late last week.

This episode brought back some memories of the first “fix” the telescope faced. Back when I was first in graduate school, HST had just been launched and scientists were eagerly awaiting the first views through its portals. The bad news of spherical aberration was terrifying, especially considering how much we’d spent on the thing, and how many peoples’ careers were entwined with the instruments onboard (including my advisor’s!).

Now it’s 16 years later and this venerable telescope is up there still ticking after a few refurbishment and repair missions, and cranking out incredibly great science. My first well-received book (Hubble Vision, now out of print in both editions, but I know you can still find it at Amazon) dealt with the technical issues and also the science as it started coming in.

HST left behind the “techno-flop” label a long time ago. I was glad to see those terrible times end because most of us who were on the teams or knew people on the teams knew that the scope could be made to work. It took a lot of ingenuity and sweat, but it got done.

I was intrigued to see a chart of where HST has looked in the sky during its years on orbit. It seems to have looked literally in nearly every direction, and out to the most distant reaches of the observable universe. It has made more than 700,000 exposures and looked at more than 22,000 targets.

Despite the accomplishments, HST isn’t out of the woods yet. It is way overdue for a refurbishing mission. This week’s successful shuttle mission may put an HST “upgrade” mission back on the books. We can only hope. This is one darned fine instrument, and it deserves to be brought back to life as often and for as long as we can do it, or until the James Webb Space Telescope is a reality.