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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

🌌 NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

New Eyes for the Hubble Space Telescope Credit:

Date: 1997-02-21

New Eyes for the Hubble Space Telescope
Credit:

View HD Image

Explanation:

The Hubble Space Telescope's
second servicing mission has been completed. Every few years,
the telescope is visited by a Space Shuttle
to allow astronauts
to switch old instruments for new. This time, the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph
and Faint Object Spectrograph
were replaced by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer
and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.
These new instruments will act like eyes sharing the 2.4-meter
telescope mirror with the remaining instruments: the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2
and the Faint Object Camera.
The Hubble Space Telescope
can take clearer pictures
than ground based telescopes because its images are not blurred
by the Earth's atmosphere.
Pictured in the final phases of a space walk from the second servicing mission, astronauts Mark Lee (right) and Steven Smith work on HST while perched on the Shuttle's remote manipulator arm.