Ball Aerospace instruments enable early observations from NASA's restored Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope’s newest instruments built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. are demonstrating early promise for spectacular long-term results. NASA has released early observations from Hubble following installation of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), revealing new details about a variety of objects including interacting galaxies, globular clusters, and giant clouds of gas between distant galaxies.
“Ball Aerospace and Hubble have traveled three billion miles together since the launch in 1990 to provide NASA with astronomical discoveries that have proven pivotal to our understanding of the universe,” said David L. Taylor, President and CEO of Ball Aerospace. “We’re very proud to be a part of such an historic and successful NASA mission.”
Hubble’s new super powers are due to state-of-the-art instruments installed by astronauts during Servicing Mission 4 in May 2009. Astronauts also repaired two instruments previously built by Ball: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. COS and the latest Wide Field Camera are equipped with the most advanced detector capabilities ever flown in space.
Ball Aerospace has been a key player on the Hubble program since our engineers designed and built the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement instrument that compensated for the original primary mirror. Ball has built seven instruments for Hubble including all four of the working science instruments currently onboard.
NASA anticipates that Hubble will continue to provide new and unprecedented data until its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is launched in 2014. Ball Aerospace is the principal subcontractor for the Webb’s advanced optical technology and lightweight mirror system. The Webb’s primary mirror is more than twice the diameter of Hubble's and is designed to look still deeper into space to see the earliest stars and galaxies.