February 21, 1997
The universe has spent billions of years making things that shine. On your birthday, we celebrate one of its quieter masterpieces.
New Eyes for the Hubble Space Telescope Credit:
Birthday · February 21, 1997
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published February 21, 1997. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
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.