And on to the Refurbishment!

I can never get enough of watching HST on orbit during these servicing missions. It’s so graceful-looking and majestic as it floats in orbit high above the planet.

This is a pretty ambitious servicing mission, and when the astronauts are through installing new equipment and refurbishing other parts of the telescope’s systems, HST should be good to go for plenty of years.  I’m particularly excited to see what the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (which will be installed in place of the old corrective optics installed after HST was diagnosed with spherical aberration) will show us. That instrument is the brainchild of former colleagues back at the University of Colorado. When I was a graduate student there, I worked as part of a team for another HST instrument — the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, which came out in 1997 and was replaced by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). STIS has been in safe mode and will be worked on during this mission to bring it back to life.

Both of those instruments (GHRS and STIS) gave HST sensitivity in ultraviolet wavelengths. Some pretty exciting things give off ultraviolet radiation, and so making HST a multi-wavelength observatory was an important part of its design. The NICMOS (which has been having problems) gave HST some of its infrared capability, allowing the telescope to peer into such places as starbirth clouds. It may be restarted after this mission is complete.

This is all in addition to the “visual” instruments onboard the telescope — the Wide-field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). They provide the optical view of the universe. WFPC2 is coming out, to be replaced with Wide-field Camera 3.

So, the “grand old man” of orbital astronomy is getting a new lease on life. It’s a mission that all of us Hubble Huggers have been awaiting since 2002 — and I can’t wait to see what HST will show us next!