Hubble Sees the Universe in a New Light
News story originally written on October 9, 1998

A new instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope can see farther away than anything before. It's called the NICMOS--the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer.

The NICMOS takes pictures using infrared light. You may have seen infrared pictures in the movies. When people put on fancy glasses that give them "night vision" they are looking at the world in infrared light. Hubble used to take pictures using visible light, the kind that you can see with your eyes. But you can't see as far in these pictures because the visible light is red-shifted into infrared light.

NASA plans to launch a new telescope in 2007 that will be able to take even better pictures than the NICMOS.

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