Longer entry
I found a packet of data that I could piggyback a bit of a longer entry on, but I still have to make this short. First, thanks for all of your concern. Nice to know I've got friends down there.

Second, for those of you curious about what exactly is going on. Basically what broke is a component that was originally expected to fail back in 2002, so to a certain extent it was already operating on borrowed time. It had been added a half decade earlier in one of the missions to upgrade my hardware. The component, officially the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, has been running on backup functionality since a failure of the primary systems back in 2001, so this isn't the first time I've had problem with it. I'm still up here, and I'm still running, but only at about 70% of my possible functionality. Without the STIS, I can't really process light into component spectra and the like, which is a bit of a bother, but certainly doesn't curtail all observation, just some.

I haven't been told yet what the plan is for repairs, if any, but then again, they don't tell me much.

Oops, running out of packet space. 4##21rc099-..