Guaranteed time observations support for Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) on HST

The goals of the GTO effort are for investigations defined in previous years by the IDT to be carried out as HST observations and for the results to be communicated to the scientific community and to the public. The search for possible black holes in the nuclei of both normal and active nucleus galaxies has had to be delayed to the post-servicing era. FOS spectropolarimetric observations of the nuclear region of the peculiar Seyfert galaxy Mrk 231 reveal that the continuum polarization peaks at 18% in the near UV and then declines rapidly toward shorter wavelengths. The papers on the absorption line analysis for our galactic halo address the spatial distribution of high and intermediate level ions in the halo and illustrate the patchy and heterogeneous nature of the halo. The papers on the scattering characteristics of the HST/FOS have provided us with data that shows that the HST mirror surfaces are quite smooth, even at the UV wavelengths. WF-PC and FOC images of the halo PN K648 have been fully analyzed.