25th Anniversary of the STS-35 Astro-1Mission

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HUT1

Astro-1 (STS-35) was a dedicated astronomy mission on space shuttle Columbia from December 2-10, 1990.  It carried three UV and one X-ray telescope into orbit. One of them was the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT), built at JHU (P&A) and APL. HUT combined a 0.9 meter mirror with a prime focus spectrograph to obtain spectroscopic data of objects in the far ultraviolet (90 – 185 nm) spectral region.

The payload was operated attached to the space shuttle, and pointed by the Instrument Pointing System. Astronauts, including JHU’s own Dr. Samuel Durrance, operated the telescopes from the aft flight deck of the shuttle, supported by a ground crew at NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.