Photon Detector Assembly (PDA) for Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Camera, engineering model

This flight spare PDA (Photon Detector Assembly) instrument would have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Camera, should the flight version have become unavailable. It could detect individual photons of visible and ultraviolet light from across space and magnify them by 100,000 times to reveal the faintest of cosmic light sources. After 12 years aboard Hubble the actual flight camera, and its PDA detector, was returned to Earth in 2002 aboard the Space Shuttle. The PDA was developed for the European Space Agency from a revolutionary electronic detector design devised by British astronomer Professor Alec Boksenburg.

This flight spare PDA (Photon Detector Assembly) instrument would have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Camera, should the flight version have become unavailable. It could detect individual photons of visible and ultraviolet light from across space and magnify them by 100,000 times to reveal the faintest of cosmic light sources. After 12 years aboard Hubble the actual flight camera, and its PDA detector, was returned to Earth in 2002 aboard the Space Shuttle. The PDA was developed for the European Space Agency from a revolutionary electronic detector design devised by British astronomer Professor Alec Boksenburg.