Faint Object Camera

The Faint Object Camera (FOC) was a camera installed on the Hubble Space Telescope from launch in 1990 until 2002. It was replaced by the Advanced Camera for Surveys. In December 1993, Hubble's vision was corrected on STS-61 by installing COSTAR, which corrected the problem with Hubble's mirror before it reached an instrument like FOC. Later instruments had this correction built in, which is why it was possible to later remove COSTAR itself and replace it with a new science instrument.

The camera was built by Dornier GmbH and was funded by the European Space Agency. The unit actually consists of two complete and independent camera systems designed to provide extremely high resolution, exceeding 0.05 arcseconds. It is designed to view very faint UV and optical light from 115 to 650 nanometers in wavelength.^[1] FOC has been compared to a "telephoto" lens, providing a high resolution in a small field of view.^[2] FOC could distinguish between two points 0.05 arc-seconds apart.^[2]

Rather than CCDs the FOC used photon-counting digicons as its detector.^[1]

The camera was designed to operate at low, medium, or high resolution. The angular resolution and field of view at each resolution were as follows:^[3]

	Angular resolution	Field of view
Low resolution (f/48)	0.043 arcseconds	22 arcseconds
Medium resolution (f/96)	0.022 arcseconds	11 arcseconds
High resolution (f/288)	0.0072 arcseconds	3.6 arcseconds

Imaging examples

Space work

References

^ ^a ^b Hall, Donald N. B., ed. (1982). The Space Telescope Observatory (Technical report). NASA. CP-2244., page 40. A 40 MB PDF file.
^ ^a ^b FOC Archived 2010-07-26 at the Wayback Machine.
^ "FOC – Faint Object Camera". Hubble. European Space Agency. 2006-12-12. Retrieved 2007-02-07.
^ Nova Cygni 1992

External links

First FOC image
Images of Nova Cygni 1992 With Hubble's Old and New Optics Archived 2015-03-06 at the Wayback Machine
Pluto by FOC

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[CP-2244-1] Hall, Donald N. B., ed. (1982). The Space Telescope Observatory (Technical report). NASA. CP-2244., page 40. A 40 MB PDF file.

[FOC-2] FOC Archived 2010-07-26 at the Wayback Machine.

[ESA-FOC-3] "FOC – Faint Object Camera". Hubble. European Space Agency. 2006-12-12. Retrieved 2007-02-07.

[4] Nova Cygni 1992

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v t e Hubble Space Telescope
Current instruments	Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3)
Previous instruments	Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) Faint Object Camera (FOC) Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS/HRS) High Speed Photometer (HSP) Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WFPC) Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2)
Space Shuttle missions	Launch: STS-31 (1990, Discovery) Servicing: STS-61 (1993, Endeavour) STS-82 (1997, Discovery) STS-103 (1999, Discovery) STS-109 (2002, Columbia) STS-125 (2009, Atlantis)
Special fields and images	Pillars of Creation (1995) Hubble Deep Field (1995) Hubble Deep Field South (1998) Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2003–04) Extended Groth Strip (2004–05) SWEEPS (2006) Mystic Mountain (2010) Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (2012) Zooming in on the Andromeda Galaxy (2015) Hubble Legacy Field (2019) Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey Anniversary images List of deep fields
Related	Great Observatories program Space Telescope Science Institute Goddard Space Flight Center NASA Edwin Hubble Hubble (2010 documentary) Hubble Origins Probe
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