Friday, April 27, 2007

Hubble cage match: STIS vs ACS

Servicing Mission 4 to the Hubble Space Telescope will instal new gyros, batteries, and 2 spanking-new instruments (COS and WPFC3). There may also be time to repair one or two existing, dead instruments (STIS and ACS).

If NASA only has time/money/astronauts to repair EITHER STIS (the UV imaging spectrograph) or ACS (the optical camera) onboard Hubble, which should get priority from a scientific standpoint?

Ignore feasibility for the moment. Just pick which one would be more profitable scientifically, and defend your answer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is a lot of research on ring systems that can’t be done with WF3 that really need the ACS repaired. Dunno if that takes priority over the UV stuff, what’s your take?

Anonymous said...

There's lots of overlap between WF3 and ACS. Less between STIS and COS. It's got to be STIS.