Hubble Up and Running, With a Picture to Prove It

After an electrical malfunction caused it to go dormant a month ago, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in business.

To show that the orbiting eye still has the same chops as ever, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore used Hubble’s wide-field planetary camera 2 to record this image of a pair of smoke-rings galaxies known as Arp 147.

The galaxies, about 450 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, apparently collided in the recent cosmic past. According to Mario Livio, of the space telescope institute, one of the galaxies passed through the other, causing a circular wave, like a pebble tossed into a pond, that has now coalesced into a ring of new blue stars. The center of the impacted galaxy can be seen as a reddish blur along the bottom of a blue ring.

Hubble went down at the end of September when a router that gathers and formats scientific data for transmission to the ground failed. There is a backup data channel on board, but it had not been used in the 18 years that Hubble has been aloft. Last weekend, Hubble’s engineers succeeded in waking it up.

NASA hopes to replace the crippled router when astronauts visit the telescope for the last scheduled servicing mission, in February.