Houston (TX) - NASA announced that it plans to fix the Hubble Telescope by remote control this week. Officials hope that Hubble will be back online by Friday.

After a data formatting computer failed on the telescope at the end of September, NASA scientists had been looking for a way to fix the telescope. They believe that an attempt Wednesday morning to boot up Hubble space telescope's redundant Side B Control Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF) will reroute the problem.

The Side A CU/SDF was responsible for receiving data from Hubble’s five main instruments and then processing it for transmission back to Earth. The Side B counterpart has not been turned on since Hubble’s launch in 1990.

NASA scientists will try to coax the Side B CU/SDF back to life, and hopefully be able to see Hubble back on its way by the end of this week. Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland will put Hubble into a safe mode for only the sixth time in its 18 year life, and send hundreds of lines of code to the telescope in an attempt to reroute the processes from Side A to Side B.

There is a risk that it will not come out of safe mode, but it is unlikely that the repairs will worsen Hubble's conditions, said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble systems management office.

The failure forced NASA to push back the next and final shuttle repair mission to Hubble. The space shuttle Atlantis mission STS-125 will last for 11 days and involve 5 space walks in an attempt to extend Hubble life for at least another 5 years.

According to NASA, since the space shuttle Discovery launched Hubble back in 1990. The aging telescope has circled Earth more than 97,000 times and relayed back access to more than 4000 astronomers.