Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2013
We study the affine formal algebra $R$ of the Lubin–Tate deformation space as a module over two different rings. One is the completed group ring of the automorphism group $\Gamma $ of the formal module of the deformation problem, the other one is the spherical Hecke algebra of a general linear group. In the most basic case of height two and ground field $\mathbb {Q}_p$, our structure results include a flatness assertion for $R$ over the spherical Hecke algebra and allow us to compute the continuous (co)homology of $\Gamma $ with coefficients in $R$.