Hubble Telescope Upgrade Mission

2008/02/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Astronautika

NASA is preparing the fifth and final mission of the Hubble telescope. In fact, this summer he wants to send seven astronauts to the Atlantis spacecraft for various repairs and new tools.

Specifically, astronauts must repair the ACS and STIS tools. ACS is an advanced observation camera that broke down in January last year after five years of operation. This was the most used tool. The other is the best spectrograph available to the telescope, whose mission is to take accurate images of objects in space at different wavelengths. This allows studying the physics of galaxies, stars, planets and nebulae.

In addition to solving them, astronauts must install COS and WFC3 tools. Thanks to the COS spectrograph, astronomers want to know the structure and evolution of the universe. The first camera of the WFC3 telescope will be panchromatic and is better than all it has now. It has capacity to occupy a wide area, with accurate color images.

NASA believes that after completion of repair and recovery, Hubble will deliver the first results shortly.