Yesterday NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute announced that the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph had been shut down due to failure of electronic parts. Here’s the announcement:

One of four science instruments aboard NASA’s Hubble’s Space Telescope suspended operations earlier this week, and engineers are now looking into possible recovery options.

The instrument, called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), was installed during the second Hubble servicing mission in 1997 and was designed to operate for five years. It has either met or exceeded all its scientific requirements.

Hubble’s other instruments, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), the Advanced Camera for Surveys, and the Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 are all operating normally.

The STIS instrument, which went into a suspended mode Tuesday, was not slated for replacement or upgrade as part of any future servicing mission.

NASA has convened an Anomaly Review Board to investigate the cause of the STIS problem and an investigation is underway to determine if the instrument is recoverable.

Preliminary findings indicate a problem with the +5V DC-DC power converter on Side 2, which supplies power to the mechanism’s electronics. STIS suffered a similar electrical malfunction in 2001 that rendered Side 1 inoperable.

A final decision on how to proceed is expected in the coming weeks as analysis of the problem progresses.

This is exceedingly worrisome. For now the telescope is working (what’s left of it), but as time goes by, more parts will fail, and ultimately we will watch as a productive and spectacular observatory is allowed to fall into disrepair. I understand the safety issues involved in shuttle repair missions for HST, but I wish there were a way to continue the productive life of this great observatory.

We’ve just spent the past few months creating a show about Hubble Space Telescope science. It was produced mainly for planetariums, but I’d love to see it get out into classrooms, if we could just figure out a way to market it. Astronomy’s such a cool subject and people always want to know more about it. Of course, the beauty of astronomy, in addition to the great pictures and wonderful science results flowing from every observatory on (and above) the planet, is that there’s always something new coming up.

In the case of Hubble Space Telescope, the discoveries keep marching down the pipeline and putting together a planetarium show (or any kind of presentation about HST) is kind of like holding a bucket under a firehose and gathering in as much as you can until the bucket overflows. I had a wealth of images to choose from, but still, it was a tough job just figuring out what NOT to use! Ultimately I ended up selecting a couple of hundred images in the first cut, winnowing that down to just under 200, and then adding in some graphics and other visual material. Then it was time to produce! The story just wrote itself. Seldom does it just flow out as it did with this one. I guess that’s a sign of goodness; I know from experience that sometimes writing isn’t so easy and the words don’t always come tripping out of the word processor like they did for this one.

But then again, the inspiration I get from HST, and really from ALL observatories, is endless. I just go hold that bucket out and see what I gather up from the datastorm descending on us from the sky every second!