Space telescope's main camera stops

BALTIMORE -- The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its stunning pictures of the universe, has stopped working, an instrument specialist who works with the camera said Saturday.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys, an instrument installed in 2002, went offline Monday, and engineers are still trying to figure out what happened and how to repair it.

"It's still offline today," Max Mutchler, an instruments specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said Saturday.

A bad transistor could be causing the trouble, engineers said. If so, a backup could be used.