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The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is a new instrument developed
for the Hubble Space Telescope planned for installation during the
next shuttle mission to the Hubble (SM4) in 2008. It is designed for
high throughput, medium resolution (R=20,000) spectroscopy of point
sources, allowing the efficient observation of numerous faint extragalactic
and galactic ultraviolet (1150-3000 A) targets. The primary science
objectives of the mission are the study of the origins of large-scale
structure in the universe, the formation and evolution of galaxies,
and the origin of stellar and planetary systems and the cold interstellar
medium. The instrument has been designed with maximum effective area
as the primary constraint, and will provide more than an order of
magnitude gain in sensitivity over previous HST instruments in this
wavelength region.
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