Posted: Wed, May 1, 2002, 7:12 PM ET (2312 GMT)
The Hubble Space Telescope's newest camera is providing astronomers with some of the best images ever, NASA announced Tuesday. Astronomers released the first images taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), installed on Hubble during the STS-109 shuttle mission in March. Those images included a view of a colliding galaxy, dubbed the Tadpole. That image also provided, as a "bonus", a view of 6,000 more distant galaxies, twice the number observed in the famous Hubble Deep Field image but requiring only one-twelfth the exposure time. Other ACS images included those of a pair of colliding spiral galaxies as well as two images of nebulae. Telescope officials also said that a mechanical refrigerator attached to the NICMOS infrared instrument has cooled the instrument to the desired temperature of 70 kelvins; the first images from NICMOS since its solid nitrogen cryogen system failed in 1998 should be released in June.

Related Links:

•  Space Telescope Science Institute images and press release
•  Sky and Telescope article
•  Houston Chronicle article
•  SPACE.com article
•  Reuters article