Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS)
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.