“We do not know the precise location and nature of the failure,” Burch said.

The instrument operates at high temperature, something that could accelerate the degradation process. Long-term exposure to radiation in space could also have played a role, the scientists said.

The failure came as NASA was finalizing an Oct. 14 repair mission to the telescope, the fourth since Hubble was launched in 1990.

Over five spacewalks, astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis were scheduled to install an ultraviolet spectrograph and a new wide-field camera, as well as repair failed electronics on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

They also planned to attach a new set of gyroscopes.

Officials said Monday that that repair would be delayed until at least February, giving the shuttle repair crew time to train on installing a backup formatter.

As frustrated as he was by the new problems, Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said if the unit was going to fail it was better that it fail before the repair mission rather than after.

While NASA studies a revamped repair mission, Burch said engineers at Goddard will probably make an attempt in the next few days to switch to a redundant set of controls that could bring the unit back to full operability.

The changeover is not as simple as throwing a switch, however, because multiple other instruments will also have to be commanded to make new connections to the formatter.

If it works, NASA will gain breathing space to plan and train for the new repair mission.

Every month that mission is delayed costs NASA about $10 million.

If all goes well with the complete set of repairs, Hubble’s new capabilities will easily surpass those it was intended to have at the time of its launch.

The repair mission has been controversial, however, because if anything goes wrong, the astronauts will be in the wrong orbit to reach the haven of the International Space Station.

Concerns over astronaut safety have been a key issue since the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003. Former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe originally canceled the repair mission, deeming it too risky.

It was only reinstated after Congress allocated the money for the repair and required that it be spent on nothing else. Current NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin believed the repair could be done safely and eventually gave the go-ahead.

Griffin has stated repeatedly that this will be the final repair for Hubble, conceivably giving it five or six more years of service before it breaks down for the last time. When that happens, it will be allowed to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.

john.johnson@latimes.com

Jason DeCrow/Associated Press

Lance Armstrong addressed the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Wednesday.

Lance Armstrong, the cancer-survivor who retired after winning a seventh consecutive Tour de France in 2005, will resume his racing career in Australia in January, and will end his season after riding down the Champs- Élysées during the Tour de France in July.

Addressing the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Wednesday, Armstrong said he would convene the first global summit of the Livestrong campaign to raise cancer awareness in Paris after the Tour.

“I cannot guarantee an eighth Tour victory,” Armstrong said as he addressed a room filled with more than 60 heads of state and hundreds of others. “But I can guarantee that the Livestrong message will touch all aspects of our society , all continents of our society and certainly touch all the different aspects of cancer.”

Armstrong, 37, retired from professional cycling in 2005 and has battled suspicions of doping during his career and since leaving the sport.

But he will be back on his bike competing at a major road racing event four months from now — at the Tour Down Under, a stage race held in Adelaide, Australia, held Jan. 20-25.

Armstrong said he will ride in three races — the race in Australia, the Tour de France and the Leadville 100 — for the Astana team, the Kazakhstan-financed team based in Belgium. Earlier, the Associated Press reported that the Kazakh Cycling Federation deputy chief, Nikolai Proskurin, said Armstrong will ride for no salary.

Since his retirement, Armstrong has traveled the world to promote his cancer foundation, which he formed after surviving testicular cancer in the late 1990s. He also has been a staple on the social circuit, attending film premieres and dating actresses and singers.

A fierce and uncompromising competitor, Armstrong has kept in reasonably good shape. He has competed in several marathons, finishing each in under three hours. Recently, he has raced in smaller cycling races near the home he is building in Aspen, Colo., finishing second this summer in the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile mountain bike race through the Rocky Mountains. He raced for Team Livestrong, which is associated with his cancer foundation.

Armstrong has said the Leadville race, in particular, stoked his desire to return to competitive racing. Just before that race, he rejoined the testing pool run by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Athletes are required to be in the program for at least six months before participating in elite-level competition.

Several weeks later, in early September, Armstrong announced his return. He said his return would “raise awareness of the global cancer burden.”

Since then, speculation about which team Armstrong would join focused on Astana, which is led by team director Johan Bruyneel, who was in charge of Armstrong’s team for each of his seven Tour victories. Astana was barred from this year’s Tour because of its involvement in doping scandals the previous two years.

In 2007, Spanish rider Alberto Contador of Astana won the Tour. On Tuesday, he told Spain’s AS newspaper that he would not be comfortable fighting with Armstrong to be Astana’s team leader because he felt that he had earned his place.

“And with Armstrong some difficult situations could arise in which the team would put him first and that would hurt me,” he told the newspaper.

Before announcing that he would join Astana, Armstrong has been adamant about proving that he is clean and not using performance-enhancing drugs.

Don Catlin, a leading antidoping scientist, said Tuesday night that he was in talks to head Armstrong’s personal antidoping program. Catlin, the former head of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, is the chief science officer of Anti-Doping Sciences Institute, a testing and consulting company, and also leads an antidoping research organization.

Catlin said he would aggressively test and monitor Armstrong to create a biological profile of Armstrong over time. Those results would be posted on the Internet for public scrutiny, he said Tuesday.

Armstrong is also broadening his cycling interests and has made moves toward forming a cycling team for riders under 23, and Taylor Phinney — who has been hailed as the next Lance Armstrong — is on the cusp of signing, Taylor and his father, Davis Phinney, said Tuesday.

Axel Merckx, the son of Eddy Merckx, the great Belgian cyclist, will be the team director, said Davis Phinney.

Google’s first Android-based phone was announced yesterday and so far, the response has been mixed. Some believe it’ll be the next big thing in the cell phone business because it adds some basics — GPS and a physical keyboard — that the iPhone is lacking. Others believe the G1 will fall flat on its face because it’s not unique and its omissions (Exchange support, for one) will make it lose out in the corporate space.

I tend to agree on both counts. I think Android could be a major hit in the cell phone space, but the G1 won’t be able to stand up to Apple or RIM. It’s too underpowered and its obvious omissions tell me T-Mobile and Google rushed it before it was ready.

But Android is an entirely different story. At its core, Android is a platform that has tons of potential. It’s not only open (which is probably the best feature), it offers full Google integration, which is a key concept in today’s age of Google domination, and its touch-screen capabilities mean Apple isn’t the only other major company doing something unique in the market.

But my belief that Android will be a success goes far beyond the product itself. Call me crazy, but I can’t think of one reason why anyone would underestimate Google. Countless times, companies have ignored Google and let it slip into a market, only to learn when it’s too late that it’s the leader.

And while it’s easy for Apple and the rest to scoff now, you can bet that that’s exactly what Google wants.

Who would have thought that Google would become such a powerhouse in the tech industry? Ask.com certainly didn’t think it could happen and neither did Yahoo. AOL must have thought Google was just another flash in the pan. Oh how wrong they were.

And what about Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and the rest? Certainly Microsoft and Yahoo didn’t believe that a product called Gmail would make an impact, right? After all, why would anyone actually want to use an online email application from Google when they can use Outlook on any Windows machine in existence? Nice one, Microsoft.

Speaking of Microsoft, where was it when Google was building its online advertising empire? And why didn’t it stop Google in its tracks once the company started bringing Google Docs online to compete with Office? Oh, and what about that whole search thing? Didn’t Microsoft see that one coming?

Google has its grips in countless markets in the tech industry. It leads the way in search and advertising, but it’s a major player in online productivity apps, mapping solutions, and a slew of other places where the leader was supplanted without much worry. And although it’s still struggling with YouTube, we can’t forget that Google was the only company that had both the money and vision to acquire that site.

The key to Google’s success throughout the years is two-fold: it offered superior products because it understood what customers wanted, but it also capitalized on all its competitors that failed to believe that a company with that crazy name could become a powerhouse in any market.

Oh, how wrong they were.

And now, as Android finally hits store shelves next month, companies in the cell phone industry are making the same mistake. Microsoft claims it isn’t worried about Android (we’ve been down this road before, Microsoft), Apple doesn’t see it as a worry, and RIM has practically ignored it. All the while, Sergey and Larry have been forming alliances with companies that will see dozens of Android-based phones hit store shelves over the next few years.

Have any of these companies learned anything? Sure, the search and advertising business is much different that cell phone software, but Google’s knowledge about what the consumer wants hasn’t changed. Worse, Google’s understanding of what the market needs has gotten better over time.

At this point, I don’t know if Android will lead the way in the cell phone industry and I have no idea if Google will supplant Apple and the rest or face annihilation. But if I had to put money on the most likely outcome, I wouldn’t bet against Google. The company has been right too many times to bet against it.

Apple, RIM, Microsoft, and the rest need to wake up and realize that the G1’s success isn’t indicative of the future success of Google in the cell phone industry. Android is.

A sticking point in talks has been how to verify North Korea’s disarmament

The US has urged North Korea to reconsider its decision to bar UN monitors from its main nuclear complex.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said restarting its nuclear programme would deepen Pyongyang’s isolation, but she added that talks were not dead.

The UN’s atomic watchdog earlier said it had removed seals and surveillance cameras from part of the Yongbyon plant at North Korea’s request.

The move comes amid a dispute over an international disarmament-for-aid deal.

North Korea said it planned to restart nuclear activities earlier this month because the US had not fulfilled its part of the deal to remove Pyongyang from its terrorism blacklist.

Satellite view of nuclear site

The White House said that would only happen when North Korea allowed monitors to verify claims it had made about its nuclear arms programme.

The UN nuclear inspectors have been expelled from the most sensitive part of the Yongbyon facility: the reprocessing plant which can be used to make weapons-grade plutonium.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that Pyongyang intended to introduce nuclear material at the facility next week.

Its inspectors had been observing the process to shut down Yongbyon - as part of a deal struck in six-party talks with South Korea, the US, China, Russia and Japan.

Ms Rice said that discussions with the North on its obligations for denuclearisation were “by no means” dead.

“We’ve been through ups and downs in this process before. The important thing is that this is a six-party process and that means there other states that are carrying the same message,” she said.

Symbolic gesture

Pyongyang began dismantling the reactor last November.

It was expecting to be removed from the US terror list after submitting a long-delayed account of its nuclear facilities to the international talks in June, in accordance with the disarmament deal it signed in 2007.

It also blew up the main cooling tower at Yongbyon in a symbolic gesture of its commitment to the process.

However, the US said it would not remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism until procedures by which the North’s disarmament would be verified were established.

The North has been locked in international discussions for years over its nuclear ambitions.

North and South Korea have been technically at war since their 1950-53 conflict ended without a peace treaty.

Fuel rods

Experts say the Yongbyon plant could take up to a year to bring back into commission, so there will be no new plutonium production for a while.

However, there is plenty already available in the form of the spent fuel rods, taken from the reactor core, but only removed to a water-cooled tank on the site, says the BBC’s John Sudworth in Seoul.

It is this nuclear material that will now be introduced into the separate plutonium reprocessing plant, according to the information given to the IAEA.

Some estimates suggest the fuel rods could yield about 6kg (13lbs) of plutonium within two to three months - enough for one atomic bomb to add to North Korea’s existing stockpile.