NASA has selected a Johns Hopkins University design for a $30 million camera to be installed in the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 1999.
The Hubble Advanced Camera for Exploration (HACE) will be a major advance over the telescope's current camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera-2. That instrument was installed during the space shuttle Endeavour's rescue mission last December.
HACE will greatly enhance the telescope's "superlative imaging capabilities well into the next century," said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's Hubble program scientist.
"It will allow astronomers to make even more detailed observations of black holes, quasars and galaxies which formed immediately after the Big Bang, as well as solar system objects."
Leading the HACE project at Hopkins will be Dr. Holland Ford, a professor of physics and astronomy. He led the development of the COSTAR instrument installed successfully last December to correct the optics in Hubble's flawed main mirror.
The Ball Aerospace Corp., of Boulder, Colo., which built COSTAR, will be the prime hardware contractor for HACE, said officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The camera will be constructed in Boulder.
"It is significant for a university like Hopkins to win" this contract over the competitors, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Dr. Ford said.
"This is good news for me and my science team," he said, referring to the 15 people who will work with him.