A high-tech refrigerator installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in March has proven itself to be a revolutionary piece of technology. Excited astronomers recently showed off some stunning infrared pictures taken with Hubble’s near infrared camera multi-object spectrometer (NICMOS).
The infrared instrument re-quires super-cooling for its detector to cryogenic temperatures. NICMOS’s original design called for the detectors to be encased in a solid block of super-cooled nitrogen at a temperature of -333 degrees F. The nitrogen would gradually boil off over a five-year period, while NICMOS viewed the infrared universe.