2004 WAS a bad year for astronomer Michael Shull. His problems began
when a key instrument on board the Hubble Space Telescope failed,
abruptly ending his promising observations of the wispy ionised gas
that drifts between the galaxies. Things might not have seemed so bad
had NASA not been forced to ground its shuttles following Columbia's
fatal crash the year before. One of the cancelled missions was to
Hubble to install a new instrument, partly developed by Shull, that
would have had him back up and running. But with the instrument firmly
grounded, Shull, who works at the University of Colorado in Boulder,
has been stuck analysing old data ever since.

Much more at http://space.newscientist.com/articl...ng-hubble.html