Hopkins wins award for space technology

While Popular Science only publishes its Best of "What's New" section in the December edition of the magazine, the award winners were officially announced on Nov 8. Among those winners is a team of scientists, led by faculty members at Johns Hopkins, who created the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), a deep-space camera that was installed in the Hubble Space Telescope in March, replaced the Hubble's Faint Object Camera, the last piece of the Hubble's original equipment.

The ACS is comprised of three cameras: a wide field camera, a high-resolution camera and a solar blind camera. The ACS is able to detect, or "see," radiation in the range of ultraviolet through near-infrared. Scientists hope that the camera will have the ability to actually see planets, rather than simply detect their existence.

The team which designed the ACS was lead by Dr. Holland Ford, an astronomy professor in the Krieger School of Arts and Science at Johns Hopkins. While members of the team came from a myriad of institutions across the country, they were mainly from Johns Hopkins, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Ball Aerospace Corp. and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Scott Mowbray, editor-in-chief of the magazine, wrote in a cover letter to the winners, "To win, a product or technology must represent a significant step forward in its category. ... We review thousands of new products and innovations and choose just 100 winners in 10 categories."

Dr. Ford said in a press-release that "this award from Popular Science provides a wonderful new acknowledgment of the innovative work that went into the creation of ACS ... We took advantage of new techniques and technology developed since Hubble's inception to deliver increased observing power at greatly reduced costs."

In the press-release that accompanied the ACS installation Ford was quoted as saying that "if you had two fireflies six feet apart in Tokyo, Hubble's vision with ACS will be so fine that it will be able to tell from Washington, D.C., that they were two different fireflies instead of one.

"These are among the best images of the distant universe humans have ever seen," Ford said in the accompanying press-release.