NASA engineers say that they know how to fix the Hubble telescope, which had an abrupt failure two weeks ago, causing the National Space Administration firm to lose about $10 million a month. This comes from the delay of the Hubble upgrade mission that should have taken place in October. A router that formats data and helps relay it to the ground failed, causing the telescope to go into a “safe mode”.

In order to fix the telescope, NASA engineers will have to wake up computer parts that have been sleeping in space for more than 18 years. On Wednesday, NASA will start a remote-control fix of a major glitch that stopped the telescope from capturing and beaming down pictures. Engineers predict that stunning astronomy photos will be sent back to Earth by Friday. The key of the reparation is to activate a backup data-handling system that hasn’t been turned on since Hubble was launched in 1990. Science data will be rerouted to that system. There is a chance that this might not work, even if space components or other satellites that have not been powered for 10 or 15 years have worked when activated. A team of about 40 engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland will send on Wednesday hundreds of lines of complicated code up to Hubble. The telescope will be put to safe mode, but there is a risk that it will not come out of safe mode. Anyhow, the repairs can’t worsen Hubble’s condition.

If the remote-controlled repair works, Hubble will suffer an upgrade in February. Astronauts will install a spectrograph and wide-field camera, as well as repair electronics on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Furthermore, old Hubble needs a new set of gyroscopes.