Hubble's Back in Action

The Hubble has perfect vision again. NASA today released the first photos taken by the space telescope since an instrumental glitch put it out of commission last month, Space.com reports. Engineers fixed the problem this week, then got photos of a pair of galaxies about 400 million light-years from Earth. The two galaxies look a bit like the number 10, leading mission specialists to call Hubble's feat a "perfect 10."

"The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline," said NASA. The agency also said today that a shuttle mission to service the telescope, postponed when the recent glitch surfaced, won't take place until May at the earliest. Once that is completed, Hubble should be good to go until 2013. (More Hubble Space Telescope stories.)