NASA has an active research program for technology development to address the needs of Astronomy and Physics mission needs. This paper outlines the strategic scientific and technical goals for the Astronomical Search for Origins and Extrasolar Planets and the Structure and Evolution of the Universe science themes. Technology development opportunities are discussed and examples given of some research programs. Research areas currently being funded include detectors, lightweight mirrors, holographic gratings, filters, and instruments for sounding rocket flights. The Explorer program, which offers opportunities for building and flying focused science missions is also described.
Collimation techniques for the Hubble Space Telescope before and after the 1993 December servicing mission are discussed. As a first step we convert actuator positions of the HST secondary mirror into tilts and decenters, by means of a conversion matrix. Theoretical estimates of wavefront errors introduced by known amounts of tilts and decenters are related to each other by means of a conversion matrix. Several sets of stellar images taken with the Faint Object Camera over a two year period are analyzed and aberration coefficients derived. A residual coma of approximately 1/19th wave at 632.8 nm is found in the images. We report here the secondary mirror move made, after the refurbishment mission in 1993 December, to remove the coma and the analysis of the images taken after the move to verify the collimation.
KEYWORDS: Point spread functions, Stars, Scattering, Mirrors, Image filtering, Light scattering, Hubble Space Telescope, Optical filters, Space telescopes, Data modeling
The effect of internal light scattering caused by the microroughness of the Hubble Space Telescope primary mirror was measured and compared with theoretical models. It was found that the effect was much smaller than predicted and would not be a problem even in the UV.
This paper gives an update on the performance of the Faint Object Camera--launched with the Hubble Space Telescope--since the last report two years ago. The primary camera, the f/96 relay, continues to work well, but the f/48 relay has recently developed serious problems. The stability of the f/96 relay has been very good with the only change being a small apparent decrease in UV sensitivity. Preliminary results for the f/48 DQE are presented. In-orbit UV flat fields have been obtained and the f/96 objective prisms and polarizers have been calibrated.
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Space Telescopes
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