Overview

Ball Aerospace built the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) instrument for the Hubble Space Telescope to study fundamental problems in cosmology and astrophysics.

The science objective is to find the:

• Origin of large-scale structure and intergalactic medium
• Formation, evolution, and ages of galaxies
• Origins of stars and planets
• Cold interstellar medium.

COS will be almost 10 times more sensitive in the far-ultraviolet and will observe distant quasars too faint for detection by previous spectrographs.  COS uses two detectors; one is Ball Aerospace-built and uses multi-anode microchannel array (MAMA) technology.

Servicing Mission 4 Activities

COS replaced the Ball Aerospace-built Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) that corrected the spherical aberration of Hubble’s primary mirror in 1993.