Astronomy professors said they are benefiting from the recent repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, which provides them information for research and classroom teaching.

“This marks a new beginning for Hubble,” said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, upon completion of repairs. “The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever.”

According to a NASA press release, a new camera and spectrograph were added to the telescope, and an additional camera used for advanced surveying and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph were repaired at the circuit board level.

“I use the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph,” astronomy professor John Cowan said. “We use it to look for radioactive elements in some of the oldest stars in the universe, and with information collected from this research, we can know what elements and types of stars were present at the very beginning of the universe.”

Cowan said the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph stopped working two years ago when the instrument’s power supply failed, and he was forced to study backlogged data acquired as early as 1993.

He said he was unsure if a repair was going to be made when the instrument broke two years ago.

“Previous NASA administrators didn’t want to fix Hubble at all,” Cowan said. “There was a great deal of doubt if there was going to be any repair made to any part of the telescope.”

After an administrative change, Cowan was notified the telescope was going to be repaired, but it was still not sure if his instrument would be fixed, Cowan said.

“We weren’t even sure if our instrument was going to be fixed when the repair mission was announced,” Cowan said. “Out of the list of the 10 things to repair on the telescope, we weren’t even in the top five. We were more like number six if not number eight, and fixing STIS isn’t exactly an easy thing to do.”

He said astronauts repairing the spectrograph had to remove 150 bolts while floating upside down in space before they could access the broken instrument for repairs.

“We found out the repair was approved and was going to be made at the last minute, almost at the same time the shuttle was about to launch,” Cowan said. “They fixed everything and were very successful in their mission.”

Cowan said he is ready to begin studying with the repaired spectrograph but has to wait until this winter to begin his research because of administrative delays from the organization who is in charge of operating the instrument.

Other professors are benefiting from the recent overall repairs made to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomy professor Yun Wang said she does not directly use Hubble for her work, but benefits from discoveries made by researchers using the telescope.

“I do use data of supernovae that other astronomers have obtained and published [using Hubble],” Wang said. “Thus I think the repair of the [telescope] is a very good thing, and I expect to benefit in the long run when new data is obtained by others and published.”