ACS on Hubble badly injured, may be dead?
A famous champion is badly injured on both sides and may need to be put down.
I'm not talking about Barbaro the racehorse, but about the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. ACS suffered a (smoking) short circuit on Jan 27 that fried the Side B electronics.
Like other NASA instruments, ACS has redundant Side A and Side B electronics. ACS was using side B due to an earlier fault on Side A. Side B is now most probably dead. Side A may be usable, but probably only in limited modes that exclude the Wide Field Camera (WFC) responsible for the pretty pictures you've enjoyed from ACS & Hubble.
Of course, this happened the day after astronomers submitted 498 proposals to use ACS this year. Everyone's scrambling to rewrite, or create new proposals, now that ACS is dead or severely limited. I'm pondering writing a quickie Nicmos proposal -- it's an old instrument with a small field of view, and the observations wouldn't be very efficient -- but it may now be one of the better uses of HST.