Paper Session I-B - Medical Spin-Off Benefits of Hubble CCD's

The science discoveries made by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the recent success of the Second Servicing Mission have captured the imagination of the science community and the public as a whole. What is less generally known is that astronomers will not be the first to benefit from the new science instruments installed on orbit this year. For the last two years, technology developed for the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) has enabled an advanced diagnostic breast biopsy procedure that has already benefited thousands of women.Modern telescopic instruments rely on sophisticated detection devices that can convert observed photons into electrical signals, which can in turn be converted to images or spectrographic data. The stringent scientific performance requirements push the state of the art, and NASA scientists recognized early in the life of STIS that careful detector selection and development would be needed to achieve their science goals. The detector chosen for one of the three STIS observing channels was a charge-coupled device (CCD). CCD’s were originally developed by Bell Laboratories in 1970 and have enjoyed tremendous commercial growth over the past twenty-five years in high-speed imagers ranging from videocameras to industrial robots.