Hubble Instrument Celebrates 20 Years of Service

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument celebrates twenty years of operation onboard the Hubble Space Telescope, imaging galaxies, planets, and gravitational lenses.

IMAGE: This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

Just because you have a few decades on you, doesn’t mean you aren’t still useful. Take the Hubble Space Telescope. This amazing space telescope has been going strong for the better part of thirty years, one flawed mirror aside. It’s a Millennial telescope, in fact, and I’m sure that we could make some astute comparisons here, but let’s move on to the real reason we’re talking about this workhorse.

While Hubble is just over thirty, not every instrument has been on the telescope for that long. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was installed on March 7, 2002, by astronauts on Hubble Servicing Mission 3B or STS-109. Which makes the ACS twenty years old this week, so happy birthday! Astronaut Mike Massimino was one of the astronauts that helped install the instrument during a spacewalk, and he notes: We knew the ACS would add so much discovery potential to the telescope, but I don’t think anybody really understood everything it could do. It was going to unlock the secrets of the Universe.