NATION IN BRIEF : MARYLAND : Hubble Telescope Hits Another Snag

An error by ground controllers triggered an emergency closure of the Hubble Space Telescope’s aperture door and sent the observatory into hibernation for nearly 12 hours, NASA officials said. But project officials at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported that the $1.5-billion telescope was brought back to normal “quickly and effectively,” in part because of the practice the controllers received during the telescope’s problem-plagued first week in orbit.