By Robert Kowalski
Denver Post Staff Writer
The Denver Post
Thursday, August 14, 1997

Astronomers at the University of Colorado and experts at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder have been selected to build a new device to watch stars and galaxies as far as ll billion light years away from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The instrument, a telephone­booth­sized device called a spectrograph, is to be flown into space aboard the space shuttle and affixed to the Hubble telescope in the year 2002.

It is to replace a mechanism attached to the Hubble in 1993 to correct a defective mirror.

"This allows us to probe various neat objects . . . quasars," said Mike Shull, a CU astrophysics professor who helped design the spectrograph proposal.

NASA awarded the $25 million spectrograph contract to CU and Ball Aerospace this week, choosing their proposal over seven others.

"It was a slugfest," said Jon Morse, a research associate with CU's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy who is the project scientist on the spectrograph program. "This is something we really worked hard at."

Scientists compare the workings of the spectrograph to the demonstration schoolchildren are shown of light running through a prism and being broken down into a spectrum of individual colors.

By gathering light from distant objects, the spectrograph breaks the light it receives into the various colors or wavelengths on the spectrum, providing scientists with valuable information about the makeup of the object.

"The spectrograph is a fancy prism," Morse said.

Unlike a prism, though, the instrument on the Hubble telescope will gather ultraviolet radiation that is not visible to the naked eye.

"I'm looking forward to using the data," Shull said. "The real core of astrophysics is taking spectrographs."

Along with providing information on stars and quasars-starlike objects believed to be the cores of distant galaxies- the new spectrograph will allow scientists to study gaseous clouds in space.

Ball Aerospace designed the spectrograph that is now aboard the Hubble telescope.

Along with scientists from Ball and CU, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Wisconsin and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore will contribute to the spectrograph project.

The new spectrograph, which Shull said would weigh "about as much as a telephone booth full of college graduates," will be able to view objects 10 to 20 times fainter in the sky than the telescope's current spectrograph.

"We're trying to understand the origins of galaxies," Shull said.

The new spectrograph, known as the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, will be placed in the tail end of the telescope and is expected to operate for seven to eight years in space, Shull said.

"This state­of­the­art instrument will be a premier Hubble instrument for most of the first decade of the next century," Edward Weiler, a Hubble telescope scientist at NASA's Washington headquarters, said.