Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), "Contact Lenses for the Telescope," on display at the new "Moving Beyond Earth" gallery in the National Air and Space Museum's Mall building.
Image Number: WEB11281-2009
Credit: Photo by Eric Long/NASM
Copyright: Smithsonian Institution
In a May service mission, the systems WFPC2 and COSTAR were brought back to Earth. WFPC2 is the oversized digital camera that recorded so many of the Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic images after its installation by shuttle astronauts in 1993. COSTAR is the other optical system that was installed in HST on that same first service mission. Its carefully designed and fabricated mirrors “popped out” into precise locations in the optical path to compensate for the famous error in Hubble’s primary mirror, allowing the originally installed science instruments to “see” sharp imagery from the telescope (WFPC2’s design incorporated its own correction and didn’t use COSTAR).
Now the camera that photographed so many stars is something of a “star” itself, on display in the main space gallery at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC. And COSTAR is there too (pictured above), part of a new exhibit called “Moving Beyond Earth.”
For more information, see this blog post at National Geographic, this recent article at The Space Review web site, or the press release for the new exhibit.
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