Infographic: NASA prepares to switch Hubble to backup hardware

On Sunday, June 13, the computer halted while astronomers were using the 31-year-old telescope to examine pulsating stars 200 million miles away. Engineers have tried to restart the $1.5 billion telescope, concluding that a degrading memory module probably led to the computer failure.

“Pretty much everything on Hubble is fully redundant, meaning there is a backup if something fails,” NASA’s astrophysics director Paul Hertz said. “We can’t say for sure exactly what is wrong, but we think it’s a failure on a component that we’re trying to isolate.”