NASA's Discovery shuttle may be "under the weather" but its Hubble Space Telescope is back in full power after its ailing Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was successfully re-activated Friday morning. NASA officials initiated the successful switchover to backup power for the camera and science observations are schedule to resume Sunday.

"This is the best possible news," said Ed Ruitberg, deputy associate director for the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We were confident we could work through the camera issue, and now we can get back to doing more incredible science with the camera."

The ACS is a composite of three electronic cameras that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared installed during a March 2002 servicing mission. NASA officials are optimistic that the ACS will continue functioning until Hubble's next servicing mission, which is tentatively scheduled for 2007.

The Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Systems, its main eye, is expected to resume operations on July 2 if everything goes according to plan. The ACS will switch to its back-up power which will hopefully correct the electronic snafu that caused the camera to malfunction since June 19.

Hubble's Advanced Camera for Systems, or ACS, entered a "safe mode" last June 19 forcing NASA engineers to cease its operations although its other cameras continued to work. The switch to the backup power has already been made and NASA will know by today whether the reconfiguration has worked."We expect the reconfiguration will likely clear the problem with the ACS, but we do realize that it is possible that this reconfiguration will not restore the operation," said Ed Ruitberg of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "In that case, we will learn a lot more about the problem and the potential solution."

NASA officials remained optimistic that the ACS will continue to function until Hubble's next servicing mission in 2007. "The ACS was designed with a 5-year lifetime; we're well into year four and only just now are we having to begin to use the redundant capabilities. So I'm hoping it has a good long lifetime to go," Ruitberg said.

The Hubble Space Telescope, Earth's Super Eye in the Sky, has lost the use of its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).  The main cam has been offline since June 19 and managers are scrambling to turn to its other cameras and keep its operations going.

Engineers have not yet identified what caused the ACS to go into a sleep state but they aren't that worried. "We're very optimistic that the camera will be fixed", said Ed Ruitberg, associate program manager for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

While this is not the first time the ACS has gone into safe mode the current problem could be more serious requiring more than a standard software reboot. "We're still investigating the problem and working on all sorts of contingencies," said Max Mutchler at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "We're hoping for the best but preparing for other contingencies."

Various solutions have been planned but they can't be implemented until the core problem is known. "Right now we don't know what the core problem is," Mutchler said. Ruitberg thinks the most likely problem is a low-voltage power supply interface. If this is the case, he said it can be easily remedied using redundant electronics to bypass the problem area by June 30.