The telescope was often used as a testbed for a device known as the Wavefront Control Experiment in the 1990s. This was an adaptive optics system that used a deformable mirror to reduce the blurring caused by disturbances in the atmosphere of Earth. One application was the study of combining adoptive optics with fiber optics for high-accuracy spectrographs. That type of data, given enough accuracy can be used to detect exoplanets by doppler shift.
