The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is a baby grand piano sized camera built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and formerly installed on the Hubble Space Telescope. It was installed by servicing mission 1 (STS-61) in 1993, replacing the telescope's original Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WFPC). WFPC2 was used to image the Hubble Deep Field in 1995, the Hourglass Nebula and Egg Nebula in 1996, and the Hubble Deep Field South in 1998. During STS-125, WFPC2 was removed and replaced with the Wide Field Camera 3 as part of the mission's first spacewalk on May 14, 2009. After returning to Earth, the camera was displayed briefly at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science before moving to its final home at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Read more about Wide Field And Planetary Camera 2: Design, Performance
Famous quotes containing the words wide, field, planetary and/or camera:
“Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that “we choose death.””
—Barbara Ward (1914–1981)
“In what camera do you taste
Poison, in what darkness set
Glittering scales and point
The tipping tongue?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)