1/23/2024 0 Comments Nasa air and space museum![]() ![]() WFPC2 was one of Hubble’s main cameras until the Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed in 2002. ![]() This long-exposure captured the light of 4,000 galaxies stretching 12 billion years back into time. A landmark observation was the Hubble Deep Field taken in 1995. This allowed the camera to record razor-sharp images of celestial objects – from nearby planets to remote galaxies - for more than 15 years. WFPC2 was separately fitted with corrective optics to compensate for the scattered light from the primary mirror. WFPC and WFPC2 were built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. So, a replacement instrument, which was already in work as an upgrade, was hastened to completion as WFPC2. COSTAR could not correct the vision for the Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WFPC) currently on Hubble. After the amount of aberration was understood, scientists and engineers developed WFPC2 and COSTAR, which were installed in Hubble during the first space shuttle servicing mission in 1993.ĬOSTAR deployed corrective optics in front of three of Hubble’s first generation instruments – the Faint Object Camera, the Goddard High Resolution Spectrometer, and the Faint Object Spectrograph. The flaw resulted in images that were fuzzy because some of the light from the objects being studied was being scattered. The outer edge of the mirror was ground too flat by a depth of 4 microns, which is roughly equal to one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair. Soon after Hubble began sending back images in 1990, scientists discovered the telescope’s primary mirror had a flaw called spherical aberration. The exhibit features Hubble’s Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) instrument and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). “Repairing Hubble” recognizes the 24th anniversary of Hubble’s launch into space aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Two instruments that played critical roles in discoveries made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope now are on display in an exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. ![]()
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