Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT)


Astro1_sts35_big
Astro-1 observing deep space

The Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) was a 0.9 meter telescope with a prime focus far-ultraviolet spectrograph that was used to observe the 912-1850 Å spectral region at a resolution of ~3 Å. A few sources were also observed in the 415-912 Å (2nd-order) region with 1.5 Å resolution. HUT was built by scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins University and was one of three ultraviolet telescopes that flew twice on the space shuttle as a dedicated Spacelab astronomy payload.

The Astro-1 mission flew on the space shuttle Columbia during 2-10 December 1990, and obtained spectro-photometric observations of 90 targets. The Astro-2 mission flew on the space shuttle Endeavour from 3-17 March 1995, where HUT was used to obtain observations of 275 targets. Because of upgrades to HUT between the missions, the instrument was approximately twice as sensitive during the Astro-2 mission.

Astro-1, 1990Astro-2, 1995
Astro-1Astro-2