Uh oh. I have some bad news. It’s not ALL bad, but it’s pretty important to people who care about space…

Special thanks to Amy Gahran for editing a great script and making it fun!

I’m sure you have seen many of the great photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in orbit around the Earth since 1990. Unfortunately, as of Sunday, Hubble can not send pictures to us. The electronics box that handles that job is broken.

The good news is the timing.

Astronauts were preparing to go up this month in the space shuttle to make some improvements to Hubble. This was supposed to be the last-ever mission to service Hubble.

But they weren’t planning to have to repair or replace this particular electronics box.

A shuttle mission is a really, really huge deal. It takes years to do all the planning and training and it takes months to get the shuttle ready. That costs a lot of money, too. So you want to make sure that every shuttle mission has everything it needs to do the job it’s supposed to do.

If this shuttle mission had happened as planned, and then a week or two LATER this electronics box broke, that would be a big problem. Because NASA couldn’t turn right around and send another mission to Hubble very quickly — or maybe at all. And since Hubble can’t work with a broken electronics box, that would mean that all the hard work from that shuttle mission might have been wasted.

A lot of people, including me, would have been very sad about that.

So my point is, if the electronics box was going to break anyway, it’s actually a good thing that it broke before this shuttle mission took off.

There’s some other good news.

Hubble was built with a backup electronics box. Right now, NASA engineers are trying to turn that spare box on, to try to get Hubble back online soon. They don’t know whether they can make it work, but they’re trying.

This is risky, though. It’s kinda like if you get a flat tire and have only one spare tire. If you use that spare tire and then get ANOTHER flat, you’re really stuck. That’s lousy enough if you’re on a highway — but out in SPACE? That’s REALLY stuck.

That’s why NASA has delayed this shuttle mission so that they can include a replacement electronics box to bring up to Hubble. That way, it’ll still have a spare. Just in case.

What can you do to help?

First of all, a lot of people at NASA love Hubble and are working very hard to keep it going. So ask your parents if you can e-mail some of the Hubble scientists and engineers at outreach@stsci.edu to tell NASA you love Hubble too, appreciate their hard work, and are keeping your fingers crossed for them.

Also, the next time you’re looking up at the sky, look up and say: “Hang in there Hubble! We’ll have you fixed up in a jiffy!”

Hey, it couldn’t hurt!

Find lots more about the Hubble Space Telescope at http://hubblesite.org/