A "significant anomaly" aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has forced NASA to delay the shuttle Atlantis launch until at least February 2009 NASA officials said at the start of the week.  Atlantis was launching to Hubble to help repair it for the final time, and the mission was scheduled to launch in two weeks, but NASA must now test a spare computer that could help solve the issue.

The crew members of shuttle Atlantis were supposed to conduct five scheduled space walks during the 11-day mission aboard the aging space telescope.

The shuttle Endeavour mission, which would have been on standby in case of an emergency aboard Hubble, could be moved up two days to Nov. 14, shuttle programmers said.  Due to the high risk of the mission, in which the astronauts are in the wrong orbit to go to the International Space Station (ISS), some space observers said the Hubble repair simply isn't worth the risk.

Hubble is now unable to format or store any data collected from its instruments, and can no longer transmit the information to researchers on Earth.  The problem lies in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SIC&DH) Unit, which is responsible for the Science Data Formatter aboard the Hubble.

Hubble operators expect to use a backup channel to help bring the telescope back into service sometime this weekend, or early next week.  But since switching over will leave the telescope without a backup, the astronauts aboard Atlantis are expected to fully replace the failed unit.

"If we just switch over to Side B of the Science Data Formatter, we would be left with a system that has several single-point failures, and that would be a risk to the mission for the long duration," a NASA official said.

Researchers are still unsure what caused the problem, but guess long-term space radiation could have damaged the instrument, which operates at a high temperature.

Each month the Hubble repair mission is delayed costs NASA around $10 million.