We have not seen any further incidences of the shutter anomaly since installation of the software patch on November 08. From all appearances, the patch has corrected the problem. We will continue to monitor the situation, and work is continuing to understand what caused the anomaly so we can better judge whether or not it is likely to re-appear as the mechanisms continue to age. The software patch was successfuly installed into the WFPC2 computer yesterday and a series of test exposures was run today.
All exposures appear to have executed properly and produced nominal results.
These operational changes should be completely transparent to observers. We expect to resume normal science observations on the evening of November 09. Thanks go out to numerous people at GSFC, JPL, and STScI for their assistance over the last few weeks. A few days ago we began seeing a new type of shutter anomaly which is precipitated by occurrences of the earlier anomaly previously described. There is some small probability that the new anomaly could damaged the shutter mechanism, so we have decided to suspend further observations until the software patch is installed.