Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2

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:

    My uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retalliate upon a fly.
    Go,—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose ... go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

    Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?
    Karen Horney (1885–1952)

    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)

    The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
    Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)