Abstract

The Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) unit, designed by Murk Bottema of Ball Aerospace, has been installed in the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to compensate for the unwanted residual spherical aberration in the telescope primary mirror. The Space Telescope is designed to have five active focal plane regions for science data acquisition. The center of the format is reserved for the Wide Field and Planetary Cameras, the testing of which are discussed in a separate paper. Surrounding this reserved center format are four 90 degree ring sectors. Each sector supplies light to a separate science package. To install COSTAR, one scientific instrument, the High Speed Photometer, was removed. COSTAR then deployed mirrors into the optical path of each of the three remaining instruments. The three instruments fed by COSTAR are the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), and the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS).

© 1994 Optical Society of America