The outside of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, is seen before black light inspection in the clean room of the Payload Hazardous Processing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Black light inspection uses UVA fluorescence to detect possible particulate microcontamination, minute cracks or fluid leaks. The COS will be installed on the Hubble Space Telescope on space shuttle Atlantis' STS-125 mission. COS will be the most sensitive ultraviolet spectrograph ever flown on Hubble and will probe the "cosmic web" - the large-scale structure of the universe whose form is determined by the gravity of dark matter and is traced by galaxies and intergalactic gas.
<bdi><a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117448892" class="extiw" title="d:Q117448892"><span title="NASA photographer">Kim Shiflett</span></a>
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2008-08-06
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