Two pieces of space history are reuniting this week as part of an ongoing restoration project at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. The Rocket Center will hold a news conference Tuesday, Feb. 15, at 10 a.m., to showcase the Astro Restoration Project, a volunteer-led effort to restore hardware that was flown on the space shuttle as part of the Astro-1 and Astro-2 missions in the 1990s.
The news conference will touch on the history of the Astro Restoration Project, which began with a group of engineers rescuing Astro spaceflight hardware from a scrapyard. The project has grown to include dozens who worked on the original Astro missions from multiple entities, including NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Teledyne Brown Engineering. The Rocket Center provided the group with the space to restore the artifact, and Teledyne Brown provided support for the project.
After more than a year of restoration work, the Astro cruciform is now ready to be reunited with the Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo Polarimeter Experiment (WUPPE) telescope. The other telescopes, the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) and Goddard Space Flight Center’s Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT), will be mounted on the cruciform later in 2022.
More than 120 scientific papers were written from the Astro-1 observations, and more than 150 technical papers were published in astronomy journals from data gathered during the Astro-2 mission. The telescopes returned unique information about hot stars, nebulae, remnants of supernovas and interstellar gas and dust in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The telescopes were also able to observe stars in other galaxies. For more on the Astro Restoration Project, visit astrorestorationproject.org.