Helen FieldsScience Writer

Nerdy excitement downtown: two instruments that used to be on the Hubble Space Telescope are at the National Air and Space Museum! And they’re not just any instruments, they’re instruments that made news. Remember when the Hubble first launched, and it was a giant national joke? These are the instruments that fixed it in 1993.

COSTAR, the space telescope equivalent of a pair of glasses, is a set of mirrors that were ground to reverse the error in the telescope’s big mirror. The astronauts on the first Hubble servicing mission also installed WFPC2, a new camera. NASA had planned to replace the original one anyway, because they knew digital camera technology would keep changing fast; the new one just had special adjustments for the messed-up mirror.

I went to the press conference this morning to check out these instruments for myself. COSTAR is shaped like a refrigerator, but much bigger, and with a set of little mirrors sticking out of one corner.

John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who’s been on three Hubble servicing missions, pulled the COSTAR out of the telescope six months ago. “It was easy,” he says. They thought it might stick, but it popped right out. He was much more excited about the glorified fuse box sitting next to COSTAR:

It’s the power control unit for the whole telescope. He pulled it out during a servicing mission in 2002. The people controlling the telescope at Goddard had to turn Hubble’s power off while he worked on it. That meant he had to work fast; otherwise, with the heaters off, the telescope might freeze. So he spent three years training on how to disconnect the unit.

You think I’m nerdily excited about these instruments, you should’ve seen him with the wrench he used to disconnect the wires. An engineer from the Goddard Space Flight Center brought it down this morning in a briefcase, and he was all happy to see it. (“This is my favorite Hubble tool!”) I don’t think the briefcase was handcuffed to the engineer’s wrist, but maybe it should’ve been. The curators were looking covetous, and there was some doubt about whether Grunsfeld would want to part with it.