The Hubble Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, WFPC2, will be on display at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science until Wednesday, November 17.

The supercamera, which is the size of a baby grand piano, is credited with saving the Hubble Space Telescope mission and providing unprecedented and crystal clear pictures of our universe.

Hubble Space Telescope

“The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 ranks right up there with Galileo’s telescope and Newton’s apple, from a space science standpoint,” said Steven Lee, PhD, the Museum’s curator of planetary science. “From the public standpoint, this camera is Hubble. Hosting the WFPC2 is an amazing opportunity our museum.”

The Story of the WFPC2
The WFPC2 camera replaced the first camera on board NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990 with the promise that it would bring in a new era of astronomical discovery. Soon after the launch, NASA learned that the first camera had a defective main mirror and transmitted only blurred images back to Earth. After three years of work by NASA scientists, the WFPC2 was installed and soon the camera began offering stunning, razor-sharp images of our universe.For 16 years, the WFPC2 offered front-row seats to the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter, provided dramatic evidence for super-massive black holes at the core of many galaxies, detected thousands of galaxies in a “blank” region of the sky, observed weather on many of our neighboring planets, and returned views of star-birth in the Eagle Nebula’s “Pillars of Creation.” Many of these images were not only incredibly valuable to scientists, but also incredibly beautiful to the general public. Hubble became “the people’s telescope,” and the WFPC2 was the workhorse instrument of the mission; it was the camera that saved Hubble.The WFPC2 was replaced with a new camera and returned to Earth in 2009, during the final Shuttle mission to service the Hubble-and this effort became the storyline of Hubble, now playing in IMAX 3D at the Museum. Since May 2010, the camera has been on display at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where it was built. Through a special loan arrangement with NASA, it will make a brief stop in Denver while en route to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Facility in Maryland.

Museum visitors will have a unique opportunity to see this remarkable scientific instrument, complete with several “craters” in its outer skin that were caused by micrometeorite impacts during its years in orbit.

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