The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope has stopped working, Ed Campi, a NASA spokesman at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said on Saturday.

Campion said the Advanced Camera for Surveys, a third- generation instrument, went off line Monday. It sent messages Monday indicating power supply voltages were above their upper limits and causing it to stop working.

Campion said that engineers are hopeful the problem can be fixed. He said that a bad transistor could be causing the trouble, if so, a backup could be used. Another suspicion is that some of the camera's memory was disturbed by a cosmic event. That could be fixed by reloading the memory.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed on the Hubble during a servicing mission by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia in 2002. It was developed jointly by Johns Hopkins University, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ball Aerospace and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Source: Xinhua