14 DAY TRIAL // NASA has scheduled the fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope repair mission for May 11th, and, at that time, the Atlantis space shuttle will carry its seven-astronaut crew to the 17-year-old observatory, for the final repairs. During the mission, several of Hubble's instruments will be replaced or updated, and, among the new ones, engineers have included the University of California in Berkley (UCB)-built Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). This device is specifically created with the purpose of analyzing and mapping the structure of the Universe, its creators advertise.
The Boulder, Colorado-based company Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has also contributed to the COS, by creating its near ultraviolet detector. The other segment of the instrument, the far ultraviolet detector, has been constructed at the UCB Space Sciences Laboratory. During its flight to the Hubble telescope, the fragile spectrograph will be housed in a package designed, developed, constructed and readied by experts at the University of Colorado in Boulder (UC-Boulder), under the supervision of former UCB graduate student, Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences James Green.
“The main goal of COS is to look as far and as faint as possible to study the cosmic web of primordial gas to understand how galaxies formed,” UC Berkeley Astronomer Barry Welsh, who has also been involved in the spectrograph construction effort, explained. The expert added that the “cosmic web” was an intricate pattern of hot and ionized gas, left over from the time when the Universe had been created. These rarefied gas formations connect galaxies, and astronomers hope that, by studying them, they will learn how the huge complexes of galaxies, known today as clusters, came to be.
NASA also hopes to use the COS to determine how early galaxies appeared, and also how they developed over hundreds of millions of years. Astrophysicists at the agency additionally want to figure out at what rate galaxies accumulated heavy elements, generated by exploding stars within or around them. Another objective of the new instrument will be to sort out how stars and the planetary systems around them came to be, and how fast they developed.
During the STS-125 mission, astronauts aboard the Atlantis space shuttle hope to be able to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument aboard Hubble, and also to install the new Wide Field Camera 3, in addition to the COS. A new lock will also be attached to the observatory, which will be used in 2015 or 2016, when it will be time for the telescope to be de-orbited.