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Advanced Imaging Magazine
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INDUSTRY NEWS
MAY 2002
New Camera Widens Field of Discovery
As
I type this, the new Ball Aerospace & Technologies Advanced Camera
for Surveys (ACS) is pulsing back to Earth its first photos of Omega Centauri,
the largest group of stars in our galaxy. The ACS instrument was removed
from Columbia’s shuttle bay and installed by astronauts on Hubble
Space Telescope during day seven of the elevenday Hubble Servicing Mission
3B. While up there, the crew also "revived" another Ballbuilt
HST instrument, the Near-infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer
(NICMOS), installed in 1997.
ACS
was built for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The addition of
the ACS to Hubble will allow more areas of the sky to be surveyed with
greater efficiency than the camera that took the original Hubble Deep
Field observations. To survey a deep core sample that looks backward in
time to the period shortly after stars and galaxies began to form required
about ten days of intense Hubble observations with a "Wide Field/Planetary
Camera 2" (WFPC2). The ACS can accomplish that depth of observation
in less than three days.
Roughly the size of a phone booth, the ACS will survey far regions of the universe, search for extra-solar planets and observe weather and other features on planets in our own Solar System. The instrument is sensitive to wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to the far red (112-1050 nanometers).
Be sure to visit antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html for the Astronomy Picture of the Day!
Calling Dr. Surgibot
If you are among the multitude of Americans who require surgery each year, be heartened. Your surgeon’s assistant may well have nerves of steel and the sharp eye of an omniscient camera. Surgibots, which have been steadily making their way into the surgical theater, are now making waves in diagnostics. At Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, a robot has been designed to perform minimally invasive lung, liver and kidney biopsies. "We are using robots to help perform biposies, direct application of radio frequency energy to cancerous tumors and place drainage tubes," said Stephen B. Solomon, M.D. Assistant Professor of radiology and urology
at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltmore.
