Speaking of science on MIR, I was working in a space research department that was involved in building an X-ray telescope that was attached to MIR. It actually at one point got repaired in flight with a spacewalk to install a replacement detector:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sron.nl&#x2F;hea-update-category-1211&#x2F;100-hea&#x2F;2308-comis--ttm-on-the-mir-space-station.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sron.nl&#x2F;hea-update-category-1211&#x2F;100-hea&#x2F;2308-com...</a><p>Ended up in use for several years. One of the challenges was that the whole space station had to be reoriented to point the telescope, so it was tough to get to look at what you wanted to see when you wanted to see it. The technology was cool though. It was designed for hard X-rays (up to 30keV). At the time mirrors that were used to focus X-rays (using grazing incidence) could not focus above a few keV. Pinhole camera optics worked at higher energies but obviously have low throughput. The solution was basically lots of pinholes arranged in a pattern that produced a highly overlapped image, but overlapped in a way that allowed a unique deconvolution and reconstruction of the original source, so you ended up with both relatively high resolution and also high sensitivity.<p>Decent high level description here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulcarlisle.net&#x2F;codedaperture&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulcarlisle.net&#x2F;codedaperture&#x2F;</a><p>As mirror technology has improved it is possible to image high resolution X-rays with mirrors now, but gamma rays are still an application for coded masks.